


Something Close to Extraordinary

by OystersAintForMe



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Just Guys Bein Dads, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:41:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 23,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23078785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OystersAintForMe/pseuds/OystersAintForMe
Summary: Most of Mac's life has been by accident. After his father is arrested and sent to prison, Mac is left on his own to grow up, graduate high school, move out, get a job, and try his hardest not to fall in love with the wrong people. But after Dennis returns from North Dakota with Brian in tow and Mandy suddenly out of the picture, not falling in love proves harder than it’s ever been before. Oh god that’s so melodramatic. Basically it’s just your average friends-to-roommates-to-strangers-to-roommates-to-coparents-to-husbands-to-lovers story lolFor the Big Bang, with beautiful art by @wormsuckingidiot on tumblr!!!
Relationships: Mac McDonald/Dennis Reynolds
Comments: 24
Kudos: 130





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this one is much sappier than my other longfic (WHICH WILL BE UPDATED SOON) but hey, whatever, might as well own the cheese. 
> 
> okay trigger warnings: 
> 
> F-slur in first three chapters  
> Animal (snake) death in chapter 2  
> Minor character death  
> Discussion of drugs/opiates/overdosing in chapter 5 (not graphic)  
> References to the gang's anti-Semitism in the last chapter (but they are trying to be better)
> 
> BIGGEST thank you to [@wormsuckingidiot](https://wormsuckingidiot.tumblr.com) for the incredible artwork, and to the mods of the Big Bang for all of their hard work putting this together! 
> 
> Also a shoutout to all my hoors in the #hoorchat who have helped keep my spirits up, to [sunidelphia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunidelphia/pseuds/sunidelphia) for giving this fic a read and some very helpful comments, and also to [adarkercolour](https://archiveofourown.org/users/adarkercolour/pseuds/adarkercolour) for being an incredible friend

“Time heals many things because it sets us on trajectories that make the past seem impossible.” — _The Nix_ , Nathan Hill

**1977**

The first time Luther holds his son, he expects to feel something akin to a spiritual experience, an unspeakable connection to this tiny, chubby, wrinkly human being that somehow exists because of him. He didn’t think to imagine the _details_ of the feeling, and now he’ll never have the chance, because, when the mother of his son passes him the two-week-old infant, inexpertly swaddled in a thin blue blanket, he doesn’t feel anything close to extraordinary.

Luther McDonald and Meg Murphy—the baby’s mother—are not close. He doesn’t know exactly how old she is, he’s never met her parents, he doesn’t know her middle name, he doesn’t even know what she does for a living. She’s just one of his “customers,” and not even a regular customer at that. He did know that she was gay. She never told him so outright, but he knew. She probably knew that he was gay too. But that didn’t stop them from having sex. Once or twice. A few times. Who knows why? Who knows why anyone does anything when they’re high? Actually, forget the drugs; who knows why anyone does anything at all?

And now there’s a kid.

Luther stares at the baby, who looks up at him with big eyes while sucking on its fingers.

“Fuckin’ weird, isn’t it?” Meg says after a few moments of silence.

“Yeah, it’s...something,” Luther offers. He doesn’t quite know what to do with the bundle, so he begins sort of moving it around, trying to figure out how to rock it or something. That’s what people do with babies, right?

Meg huffs a short laugh at Luther’s weak attempt at something vaguely parental and lights up a cigarette. “Ugly motherfucker, isn’t he?” she says out of the corner of her mouth.

Luther looks at the baby. It is a ugly, in the way that babies usually are.

“Not as ugly as when he first popped out, though, I’ll tell you that,” Meg says. “Looked like an old man with a sunburn.”

Luther has to chuckle at that visual.

“But I guess with our genes, little Ronald wasn’t destined to be a looker.”

“Nope,” Luther agrees. Meg slowly lowers herself onto the couch. She’s wearing grey sweatpants and a light yellow threadbare T-shirt and her brown hair is pulled back into a haphazard bun. Once, after one of the handful of times they had sex, he told her (not unkindly) that she looked like a frog. She had laughed and told him that he looked like a snake. Or a lizard, maybe. They had been shitfaced at the time, but it was an accurate appraisal. So it would have been natural to assume that their kid would have resembled at least _something_ with scales. But upon further investigation, Luther concludes that something about Ronald calls to mind a puppy. An ugly puppy, but a puppy nonetheless.

“So,” Luther asks. He knows that there’s an elephant in the room, and he’s not quite sure how to address it. “How have you been?”

Meg grunts and shrugs her shoulders. “Honestly, he’s pretty easy,” she says. “Doesn’t cry too much. Sleeps like he’s dead. Wants to be held all the time, but it could be worse.”

He nods slowly. “You feel okay?”

She grunts again; this time it sounds more like a laugh. It sends the message that he shouldn’t feel like he needs to ask.

The baby in his arms is feeling heavier and heavier. He doesn’t say anything as he studies its weird, impossibly small face.

“What I said still holds, you know,” Meg says casually.

“What?”

“Relax,” she says. “You don’t gotta marry me or be my boyfriend or stick around or anything. I’m fine.”

“Oh,” Luther says.

They had had the conversation a few months ago and she’d been just as adamant, but his buddies had all told him that she would change her mind after the kid was actually born and she had to deal with all its piss and shit and puke on her own. But Meg _seemed_ to be handling herself just fine.

Luther lets out a slow, controlled breath. “I’ll still come visit.” A nicety.

“Sure.”

“It’s just that, you know, my job.” He doesn’t bother to complete the thought.

“I know.”

Luther sticks around for a few more minutes and then mutters a made-up excuse to get out of there.

A few days later, the cops show up at Luther’s door. Someone snitched and now he’s looking at a jail sentence. And while Luther doesn’t love jail—who does?—it’s also kind of a relief.

  


**Spring 1980**

The next time Luther sees his Ronald, it’s three years later, on Easter Sunday. He’s been out of Eastern State Correctional Facility for a few months, he’s been completely sober for about a year, and that’s even including the prison wine. Now he’s determined to make some positive changes in his life, so he’s agreed to meet up at church with Meg and Ronald, who Meg now calls “Ronnie.”

As he drives to the church in his shitty pick-up truck, which has been sitting in a buddy’s garage for the three years he was away, a knot of dread pulls itself tighter and tighter in his gut. Being nervous is to be expected, his AA sponsor had warned him the day before. Rick, this wiry Mexican guy who spent 10 years in prison for marijuana possession, has a daughter, about twelve years old now, and Rick has a good relationship with her, so Luther thinks his advice is trustworthy, even if he is overly positive and extremely into Jesus.

When he meets them outside the front door of the Church, among the crowd of churchgoers in their Easter dresses and suits, Ronnie takes one look at him and starts wailing. So Meg has to spend the entire service in one of the Sunday School classrooms, explaining to a screaming toddler that the scary man with the crazy eyes and the drawings on his neck is his just father. It’s not clear if Luther should follow them or give them space. He ends up sitting in the pew by himself and tries to pay attention, thinking maybe he’ll finally understand how God will save him like He apparently saved Rick.

The hope wears off as the service goes on. The psalms are so slow and the text is so old and the homily is so dry that he only finds himself nodding off. Luther wasn’t expecting much anyway. He’s got a lot to be forgiven for before God’s gonna give him the time of day.

When the service finally comes to a close, he files out with the rest of the congregation and sees Meg sitting on the steps in front of the church, smoking, and Ronnie in his little light blue polo shirt and clip-on tie, running around at top speed and tumbling on the small grass lawn next to the church.

He stands next to Meg. “He’s not as ugly as I remembered.”

“What he lacks in ugliness, he makes up for in being a little bitch.”

“That so?”

The way Meg fumbles with her purse suggests that she’s not used to it; it looks awkward, a performance of femininity instead of the real thing. Then she pulls out a carton of cigarettes, and Luther thinks, _That’s more like it_. “Want one?” she offers.

He accepts a cigarette and lights it. They stay there smoking in silence for a bit until Meg shouts for Ronnie to come over.

The little kid comes running up the steps to stand next to his mom, his cheeks bright red from exertion. Meg touches his shirt. “Ah, Ronnie, c’mon, you got grass stains all over your good shirt.” She speaks to him like he’s an adult, Luther notices. No baby talk.

Ronnie is staring up at him, wide eyes threatening to fill with tears again. Luther crouches down next to him so they’re on the same level and says, “Hey.”

Ronnie doesn’t say anything.

“It’s good to see ya.”

Ronnie still says nothing, but he’s not screaming. That’s something.

“I know I’ve been away for a little while,” Luther says. “But, well. I’m back now.”

The kid grabs his mom’s skirt and hides his face behind it, still keeping an eye on Luther.

“Ronnie, be nice, say something to your father,” Meg says, gently pushing him toward Luther. Ronnie comes out of his hiding place but still doesn’t say anything, avoiding eye contact.

“You’ve gotten big,” Luther says. “How old are you now?”

“Go on, tell him,” Meg prompts. “How old are you, Ronnie?”

Ronnie sticks out three fingers.

“And how many is that?” Meg asks.

“Free,” Ronnie says.

He has the tiniest voice Luther has ever heard, and he thinks, _Okay, so it talks now_. “ _Free_?” he says to Meg. “Well damn if that’s not fuckin’ adorable.”

“He’s kind of an idiot,” Meg says, almost fondly.

“Like father, like son.” Luther holds a hand up. “Can you give me a high five, Ronnie?”

Ronnie looks at him, unsure of what to do. Meg gently takes his hand and holds it up to lightly slap Luther’s open palm. When their hands meet with a quiet clap, Ronnie looks up at Luther like he’s just discovered the secret to the universe, and something inside Luther melts just the tiniest bit. It refreezes just as quickly.

Then Ronnie pulls his hand back again and just fucking _smacks_ it against Luther’s palm with all his strength—which honestly isn’t very much, but it sends Ronnie into a fit of giggles.

“Now _that’s_ a high five, kid,” Luther says, smiling.

Ronnie shrieks something that sounds vaguely like “high five” and keeps giggling.

There’s a warm breeze in the air that late morning in early spring. Meg is smiling, and Luther is smiling, and Ronnie is giggling, and it’s not as extraordinary as Luther thought it would be, but the feeling in his chest is big enough that he can’t just ignore it.

**1980 to 1984**

After some talking with Meg, Luther finds a job working as a dishwasher at a nearby college, and he and Meg go to city hall and get married a week after his first day on the job. They’re nowhere near in love; it’s all for the benefit of Ronnie (who they have now taken to calling “Mac” to avoid him the embarrassment of having to go by Ronald McDonald). They agree that the kid should grow up with a dad.

And just like Meg said, Mac has indeed turned out to be something of a little bitch. The kid pees the bed all the time, has nightmares every other night, seems to have the most illogical assortment of phobias (busses but not trucks, tunnels but not bridges, thunder but not lightning, ants but not spiders, mice but not rats), and—to Luther’s quiet horror—likes to play with his mother’s meager collection of old and mostly untouched makeup and jewelry.

The makeup and jewelry thing bothers him not so much because it’s _unmanly_. It’s more that Luther can remember himself being the same way when he was a kid. So he tries to toughen Mac up. He stops offering hugs, he stops hugging Mac back, and he tells him not to cry.

But Mac cries anyway, and he still goes in for hugs, and as the years go by he only gets _needier_ and _needier_ , always wanting to go outside and have a catch, always insisting that they all sit down together for dinner, always saying “I love you” even though he must have learned long ago that he wasn’t going to hear it back.

And, of course, Luther finds himself back in the meth business. At first he’s just spending time with his old buddies, a crew he really did miss (they might be junkies, but they’re good guys too), and then he decides to indulge just once, because he deserves it after being sober for so long, right? Just once to let loose for a bit, to feel that rush one last time, and then he’ll be good.

And then he’s using again, and then he doesn’t have the money to pay for his share of the bills or mortgage or food, and Meg covers him for about two months until she figures out that he’s been spending all of his dishwashing money on meth, and she threatens to kick him out if he isn’t going to contribute anything financially, so he gets some inventory and sells it, just once, just enough to make rent that month and to get Meg off his case. And then he has to do it again the next month--but that’ll be the last time. Until he does it again. And again. And soon, he’s lost his dishwashing job, and then selling meth is just what he does, and Meg knows it, but honestly, she’s gotten too tired to care.

**1984**

Mac starts second grade in the fall of 1984 and starts hanging out with a kid from his class. Charlie is a scrawny, skinny little Irish bastard child with a mop of messy black hair, freckles all over his face, and a squeaky voice that he has trouble controlling the volume of when he gets excited. His clothes are way too big for him and he’s constantly dirty. Charlie and Mac don’t spend much time around Luther, though. They’re usually either locked up in Mac’s room or just not in the house. Where they go, Luther doesn’t know, but he also doesn’t particularly care, as long as Mac doesn’t blow anything up.

It happens on a decidedly unpicturesque Sunday in December. Luther is taking the trash out to the curb when he sees Mac and Charlie walking down the sidewalk. They’re holding hands, and something inside Luther snaps. He rushes at the boys, grabs Mac’s free wrist, and yanks him away from Charlie.

“Good night, Charlie,” Luther says to the other kid, staring him down. Charlie looks at Mac with big, frightened, feral eyes, and then back at Luther.

“It’s okay, Charlie, you can go,” Mac says.

Charlie takes off at a sprint and Mac watches him go until Luther pulls him into the house.

Luther doesn’t remember exactly what he said to Mac that night. What he _does_ remember is that Mac didn’t cry at all or talk back. He just sat there, avoiding eye contact, only nodding every now and then. When Luther was finished, he went downstairs to watch TV. He didn’t see Mac for a few days after that.

Luther didn’t know how to say it in the moment—it’s one of those thoughts that he knows is there but is too blurry to decipher—but somewhere inside of him, somewhere almost unreachable, he is terrified that Mac is going to get murdered for holding another boy’s hand while walking down a street in South Philly. He never says that out loud, of course. He just reminds his son not to be a faggot, and soon Mac starts calling people he doesn’t like “faggots.” Stupid things have become now “faggy.” It stings Luther in that same hazy, unreachable place whenever he hears that word coming out of his son’s mouth, but he knows it’s for the best to raise him this way. Because he watches the nightly news and sees men, men like himself in at least one very significant way, who are sick, dying, ignored by the government, turned away from hospitals, laying down on the streets of the Capitol to get some semblance of attention, while everyone else in the entire country is openly terrified to even be in the same room as them, let alone love them.

Mac isn’t going to be like those men if Luther can help it.


	2. Chapter 2

**1986**

What are you supposed to do with a snake, Mac wants to know.

He wants to know because Charlie catched one by the river, and put it in a shoebox, and taped the shoebox shut, and brought the shoebox to Mac’s house, and now they are sitting on Mac’s bedroom floor and staring at the shoebox. Mac hasn’t seen the snake yet, but he can hear it moving around in the box every so often.

”Let’s name it,” Mac says after a while.

Charlie frowns and nods, looking important, and he should. The task of naming a snake is a serious one. “What about Slimy?” he offers.

”No. Too boring. Let’s call him Shark. Sharks are badass.”

”But it’s a snake.”

”Duh. It’s a snake, but its _name_ is Shark.”

”That’s confusing. Let’s just call it Snake.”

” _You_ can call it Snake, but I’m gonna call it Shark for short and I’m in charge so his name will really be Shark.”

Charlie doesn’t question this. He never does. Never wants to be in charge when they play. Mac likes that. Charlie nudges the box with the tip of his shoe, and they hear the snake jump into motion, slithering around inside. The box shakes a little.

”But what do we _do_ with him?”

”I dunno. Usually when me and Pete catch an animal, he kills it.”

”Really?” Mac’s eyes get big. Pete is their very tall friend. Tallest boy in the fourth grade.

”Yeah. It’s not really a big deal.”

”So...we should kill the snake.”

”Okay.”

”How do you kill a snake?”

”You bite its head off.”

”Ew, I’m not gonna do that.”

”I guess you could just step on it.”

”Oh, I know, I’ll shoot it with my BB gun.”

”That’s a stupid idea.”

”No, it’s an _awesome_ idea.” Mac is already digging around under his bed for the gun.

”You’re a bad shot! Snakes are slippery! You’d miss!”

”I’m not gonna miss.” Mac returns from under his bed with the gun. “You can hold him still. Get him out.”

”But what if you shoot me on accident?”

”I’m not gonna shoot you! Just trust me.”

Charlie chews on his hair that is long enough to reach his mouth because he’s terrified of getting haircuts. This is a secret that Mac keeps for Charlie because that’s what best friends do.

”Trust me, Charlie,” Mac says again.

Charlie grumbles, but he opens the box and picks up the snake, fingers around its neck, right under its head. The snake’s tail wriggles around in the air and Mac thinks Charlie is being very brave for not screaming.

”Hold its tail, too,” Mac says. “You gotta hold the whole thing still.”

Charlie tries to grab the snake’s tail. But he can’t get a hold of it. They start shouting at each other and Charlie loses hold of the snake. It slithers under the door and out into the hallway. Charlie flings open the door and they both chase it. It’s so fast. How is something without legs so fast? Mac leaps and God must be watching because even though he lands smack on his belly, he manages to get a hold on the snake.

Mac is about to scream because now he’s _holding_ the _snake_ , but then he notices a pair of big, worn-out boots right next to his face.

Dad.

Mac pops up to his feet, hides the snake behind his back. It writhes around in Mac’s fists and he wants to let go but Dad will be angry that Mac brought a snake into the house.

Quick look behind: Charlie’s run back into Mac’s room, peeks through the cracked door. It’s so dumb and lame and _faggy_ how scared Charlie is of Luther, especially when Mac could really use a little bit of backup here.

”Whatcha got there?” Luther asks in that way where Mac can’t tell if he’s angry, or happy, or if he just doesn’t care.

”Nothing.”

”Doesn’t seem like nothing.”

”It’s nothing!”

”Snakes aren’t nothing.”

”I don’t _have_ a snake.”

”Don’t lie to me, Mac. You’re bad at it.”

”We were going to kill it though!” Charlie cries. Both Mac and Luther look at him. Charlie squeaks and slams the door closed.

”Is that true?” Luther asks Mac. “You were going to kill it?”

”Yes?”

”Okay. Do it, then.”

”Huh?”

”Right now. Kill the snake.”

”Well, I left my gun in my—”

”Gun!” Luther laughs. Mac has never met anyone else who has a scary laugh. “You don’t need a _gun_ to kill a tiny little thing like that. Come on, show it to me.”

Mac holds the snake out in front of him. It’s squirming around and he desperately wants to let go, but Luther kneels down to get a closer look. Letting go would only make Mac look like a pussy.

”See how skinny that thing is?” Luther says, his voice low and even. “Killing it’s no harder than snapping a pencil. You just grab it with both hands and pull it apart.”

”Oh.”

”So?”

”What?”

”Do it.”

”Uh...” Mac looks at the snake, sees its face for the first time. It’s got shiny eyes and a weird snakey tongue. It looks scared. “Can’t I just keep it? As a pet?”

”Oh, son,” Luther shakes his head, disappointed. “You can’t keep something as a pet after you try to kill it. It’s always going to know what you almost did. You just have to kill it. Just grab it and pull.”

It’s harder than Mac thought it was gonna be. It definitely took more effort than breaking a pencil in half. But Luther watches the whole time, and Mac wants so bad to make him smile, make him proud, make him say “I love you, son,” so he keeps going, keeps pulling and pulling until the snake stops moving and goes limp in his hands.

The two parts of the snake are still stuck to each other with stringy, meaty bits that drip blood on the dirty carpet, and when Luther finally looks Mac in the eye, he just says, “Clean that up,” and walks back downstairs.

Breathing hard and fast, his heart pounding in his ears, Mac dashes into the bathroom and drops the dead snake in the toilet. He flushes it and washes his hands for a long time. Charlie knocks on the door at one point and says he’s gotta go home. Mac lets him.

It was hard at the time, but now, all Mac can think about is how easy it really was, how killing something actually took no effort at all, and he is absolutely, sickeningly positive that he could do it again. He could probably do it without even thinking. He could probably do it without even knowing. He could maybe even do it totally on accident.

* * *

If you leave South Philly, neighborhood of Irish Catholic and Roman Catholic churches and Irish pubs and Italian restaurants, and you head north through Center City with its emotionless skyscrapers and banks and businessmen with briefcases and stocks and 401Ks, keeping going up through North Philadelphia, past Temple University, past a handful of Nation of Islam mosques—there, up the map, is the neighborhood of Chestnut Hill, in the northern part of the map, as though someone thought it derserved to be there, above everything else.

Chestnut Hill is a neighborhood of homeowners associations, mansions, gated communities, and deeply unhappy people.

In the backyard of one of these mansions, a young boy with floppy, curly brown hair sits on the grass in the late afternoon shade of a maple tree. He’s been out here since morning, after Josefina (their nanny or maid or whatever) said something under her breath about him being a spoiled brat, which made him angry. He’s waiting for someone to come looking for him. He’s waiting for someone to notice he’s gone. He’s been planning what he’s going to say when they try to get him to come inside.

But the longer he sits out here, the more he feels justified running away in the first place. He thought for sure someone would notice he was gone, but if they aren’t noticing, then maybe he should _really_ run away.

(This kind of thing happens about once a week. The only person that ever notices is his sister, and that’s almost always because she needs help figuring out how to turn the VCR on because she’s never bothered to learn. _She’s_ the one who’s spoiled, he thinks, marking it down as more proof that Josefina has it out for him specifically.)

To pass the time, he builds little houses out of sticks and leaves and rocks. There’s always a point where he knows there’s just one more thing the house needs to be perfect, but he can never figure out what it is, so he knocks the whole thing over and starts again. To make things perfect, you have to be willing to tear things down, to give things up. It’s like how his mom doesn’t eat breakfast or lunch so she can stay pretty, or like how his dad drinks before he has to go in for a parent-teacher conference so he doesn’t get angry, or like how you sometimes have to lie to other people in order for them to love you.

Knocking the houses down is an important part of the process, the boy knows. It’s also his favorite part: the imperfect structure is there one second and gone the next—destroyed, yes, but destroyed completely and flawlessly. No one can accuse him of being less than perfect, even if the only thing he does perfectly is destroying what he’s built.

* * *

**1988**

It’s been a good day in school, mostly, especially the end of the day, because of the announcement, and Mac practically vibrates with excitement the entire walk home, skipping and leaping ahead of Charlie to strike awesome karate poses and then circling back to walk next to him again.

He waves bye to Charlie and Charlie turns down the next block to his house. Mac swings open the door and calls into the house, “Mom! Dad! I’ve got news!”

All the lights are off, though, and Mac remembers that his mom’s hours at the Jiffy Lube got changed last week, and honestly it was stupid to expect his dad to be home anyway. Whatever.

Pot, water, stove. Wait till it boils. Dump in the noodles. Set timer for 10 minutes. Try to do a pull-up for 10 minutes with the bar his dad put in the kitchen door. Timer goes off, strainer in the sink, pour in the macaroni, let it sit in the sink for a bit. Put a bit of water and some butter in the pan (the box actually says to use milk, not water, but they don’t buy milk because Mac is the only one in the house that likes milk but he can’t drink it fast enough so it goes bad and they have to throw it out so it’s not worth it his mom says) and rip open the cheese packet and pour it in. Mix until saucy. Add the macaroni to the pot, squirt out some ketchup (for the vegetables), mix, and eat in front of the television while watching an ABC Afterschool Special.

Mac has fallen asleep on the couch when he hears the front door open. It’s his dad. Mac sits up, trying to wake himself up fast because he has to tell him—

”Dad! I got into the school musical! I have a solo!”

His dad, who until then hadn’t looked at him, stops and turns on his heels. “I can get you out of that.”

”But—no, I want to do it.”

”Oh.” This is a look he often gets from his dad: he’s not angry, or disappointed, he’s just plain baffled. Like Mac is trying to explain a color his dad has never even seen.

Clearly, some backpedaling is in order. “I mean, it’s gonna be lame, I know, but I already said I do it, and the teacher is like, really on my ass about doing it, and also Charlie, _he_ wants to do it, but he’s got stage fright so I’m really just doing it to help him.”

”Riiiight.”

”I mean, I know it’s for fags.” The last word catches on his tongue. Mac kind of hates saying it; it feels bad in his mouth. But it’s a word his dad taught him, and his dad may not understand him, but that’s not his dad’s fault. Mac is the one who’s just not getting it. And that just means that Mac has to try harder to build himself into the kind of son that his dad could love, and if he can learn to speak his dad’s language, then he figures that’s half the battle. And this word, Mac always thinks maybe it’s like a trump card, a secret code to getting a smile, a nod, a “You did good, kid.”

But, like always, his dad just stares at him for a long moment, and then he stomps up the stairs without a word.

(Mac does the school play anyways. And it’s _awesome_.)

**1989**

Luther is arrested again a few months after Mac turns 12. This time, there are a couple of other charges mixed in aside from possession with intent to distribute, so he’s going to go away for awhile. Due to legal red tape, there’s a little time between the arrest and him actually going to prison, so when Mac says goodbye to him, the kid has already gotten most of the upset out of his system and he doesn’t cry.

Luther doesn’t tell anyone, but he’s worried about Mac. He’s worried that without him there to guide Mac through his teenage years, the boy will turn soft again. So he makes Mac promise to visit him in prison at least every month.

While Luther is in custody, Meg files for divorce, and he doesn’t fight it. Mac never mentions the divorce or his mom when he comes to visit, even though they both know that she’s waiting by the security desk for Mac to be done.

Eventually, Mac’s visits become less and less frequent. He keeps writing letters for a little while, and Luther occasionally writes him back, but that correspondence slows over time, too.


	3. Chapter 3

**1992**

Summer in Philadelphia is sweaty and humid and lazy and it’s probably Mac’s favorite time of year. In June he picked a few of his T-shirts, cut off their sleeves, and wore them the entire summer through. Now, by the end of August, they’re basically destroyed, stained with sweat and deodorant and slushies and ketchup and grass and dirt. Mac thinks it’s the sign of a great summer. Dennis, his new best friend (best in addition to Charlie), thinks it’s disgusting. But he can’t think it’s _too_ disgusting, since Dennis hasn’t really left his side for the entire summer (minus the three weeks he went to the Jersey Shore on vacation).

The best part about summer, though, is the nights. Summer days are about _survival_ : sneaking into the movies just for the air conditioning, stealing cold beer from liquor stores, swimming in Dennis and Dee’s pool until their parents kick them out. The surviving aspect makes Mac feel strong. But summer _nights_...after the sun sets and the city sighs in relief as the air cools down, even though it’s usually just by a few degrees...that’s the best part.

One cloudy night in late August, Mac and Dennis are lying down on the soccer field of St. Joe’s, the grass soft beneath their backs. They’re a little high and a little drunk, and they’re laughing about something stupid, and Mac can’t even remember what about, which makes him laugh even harder, which makes Dennis laugh too. When Dennis laughs, _really_ laughs, it sounds ridiculous—a cross between a shriek and a cackle, sometimes flying up into a high-pitched dizzy giggle—and it always makes Mac laugh even harder. He can’t catch his breath enough to tell Dennis to stop laughing like that. He can’t catch his breath enough to tell Dennis that he never wants to stop feeling like this.

Just then, the almost-full moon shines through a break in the clouds, and Mac looks over just in time to see the light cast bluish shadows across Dennis’s face, and through the dying embers of his laughter, he can see them from above, lying on the ground next to each other in the middle of the wide open soccer field, and Mac has a revelation: “This is the kind of thing they make movies about.”

”Dude...” Dennis turns his head to meet Mac’s eye, his expression even more unreadable than usual. Dennis has never been afraid to make his opinions known, to shut Mac down, and Mac suddenly worries that maybe that’s what’s coming, but instead Dennis says: “I know _exactly_ what you mean.”

**1994**

It’s been at least two years since Luther last saw Mac when a CO stops by his cell to tell him that he’s going to have a visitor that day.

Luther doesn’t feel much in reaction to the news, except maybe mild annoyance. Mac hadn’t told him that he would be coming to see him, and now Luther’s plan to do nothing during visiting hours were ruined.

Mac is sitting at a table in the visitation room, scanning nervously, but his face lights up when he sees Luther being escorted over. “Dad!” Luther is briefly taken aback; Mac’s voice is several octaves lower than it had been two years ago.

”Mac,” Luther says flatly as he sits on the hard metal chair opposite Mac. The kid smells powerfully of cologne.

”It’s so good to see you!”

”Is something wrong?” Luther asks, leaning back in the chair with his hands on the table. (The COs don’t always yell at you for having your hands under the table, but they do sometimes, and Luther just likes to avoid it.)

Mac laughs. “What? No, why would you think that?”

”Well, I haven’t seen you in two years,” Luther says. He’s not hurt by it, he’s just stating the facts, but Mac looks like a puppy that’s just been kicked. “I assumed this was some kind of...unique situation.”

”No, it’s...I’m sorry, dad. I just got so busy. High school is—it’s not great.”

”So drop out,” Luther offers. It’s what he did.

”I tried,” he says, smiling weakly. “But Dennis wouldn’t let me.”

”Who the fuck is Dennis?”

”You know, Dennis! Dennis Reynolds? My friend?” Mac says. “I’ve written about him in my letters, remember?”

Luther shrugs. He kind of stopped reading the letters after a while.

”Well, I told him last summer that I wasn’t gonna come back to school in the fall but, uh, he convinced me to try to finish, I guess,” Mac rubs a nervous hand along his jaw, which is covered in dark-but-wispy facial hair and acne. Luther wonders if anyone has tried to teach him how to shave. He wonders who would.

”He rich?”

”Well—I mean, yeah, but he’s not, like, a jerk about it,” Mac says defensively.

There’s an awkward silence.

”Your mother here?” Luther tries to change the subject from this Dennis kid, who he already doesn’t like.

”No, I, uh, I actually drove myself,” Mac says, his feigned nonchalance completely see-through. “You know. Got my license and shit last week. No big deal.”

”Who taught you to drive?”

”Dennis.”

There’s that kid again. “What? How old is Dennis?”

”I dunno, 17? He’s a senior too. But he got his license before I did. So.”

Luther notes that the tips of Mac’s ears are turning red. “So...”

”So...yeah.”

”So, what, you just came to see me because you wanted a reason to go for a drive or something?”

”No!” Mac assures him quickly, a sincere apology taking over his face. He’s always been far too genuine. “No! I came because I wanted to see you!”

Suspicious. “Why?”

”Because...you’re my dad?” Mac says it with the question tacked on at the end, like he’s confused how there could possibly be another reason.

”So?”

” _So_ , I love you, and your my dad, and I wanted to see you.”

”There’s something else.”

”Well, I guess...” Mac’s mouth keeps moving silently like he’s trying to find the right words, looking at Luther like he’s asking for help. He squirms around in the metal chair and it creaks, some of the screws having come loose. Finally, he just slumps down in his chair, crosses his arms, fixes his darkened gaze on the table. “I don’t know. Forget it.”

Luther says nothing for a little while. He has a feeling he knows why Mac came to visit him; he also has a feeling Mac really _doesn’t_ know. Luther ventures:

”Is this about Dennis?”

Mac’s eyes snap up and now his entire face turns red. “What? Why did you say that?”

”Nothing,” Luther shrugs. “Just a guess.”

”Why would it be about _Dennis_?”

”I don’t know. You kept bringing him up.”

”God! No, I have—I have _no_ problems with Dennis. I barely even think about that guy.”

”Right.”

The kid is obviously looking for some kind of help. But a semi-closeted meth dealer sitting across from his illegitimate son at a table in a prison visitation room is not the person Mac should be going to for advice.

Mac is getting heated. He taps his fingertips on the table in a fast, erratic rhythm and starts rubbing his neck with the other hand. “I don’t even know why I came here.”

”Okay.”

Mac glares at him. “I’m gonna go.”

Luther nods. “Okay.”

”I love you,” Mac says. He doesn’t sound like he means it right then, but he’s forcing himself to say it anyway. Luther doesn’t say it back, of course. Mac doesn’t seem like he expected anything else.

The metal chair scrapes loudly against the ground as Mac pushes back, stands up, and heads towards the door.

”Mac.”

Mac stops in his tracks but doesn’t turn around.

”Stay away from Dennis.”

Mac stands still for a second, and then continues on his way out the door.

* * * 

Mac opens the driver’s side door to the brand-new Range Rover and plops down. Dennis wakes up from his light nap and gives a stretch. “How’d it go?”

”Fine.” Mac turns the keys in the ignition and throws the car into drive, peeling out of the parking space, the tires screeching.

”Dude. Slow down.”

”I’m not going that fast.”

”You’re going 30 in a parking lot. Of a _prison_.”

”So what?”

”I’m not going to let you drive my brand-new car if you’re acting like an idiot.”

”I’ve seen you do stupider shit in this car.”

”Yeah, but it’s _my car_ ,” Dennis says. “Woah—Mac, slow down—the gate—”

Mac slams on the breaks just before they reach the gate to the parking lot. He shows the parking ticket to the guy in the stall there and throws a ten-dollar bill at him.

The gate opens and Mac stomps on the gas. Something invisible is chasing him, he knows it, but if he can just go fast enough, if he doesn’t look backwards, he can outrun it.

”Mac—seriously—pull over for a second.”

”I’m _fine_.”

”I _know_ , but—”

”Oh my god, _okay_.” Mac pulls off the road and slams on the breaks. “What do you want?”

”You’re—you just—stop acting like a dick.”

”I can act however the fuck I want. You don’t get to tell me how to act.”

”Uh, I do if you’re driving my _brand-new car_.”

”Oh, so this is just about your fancy car.”

”Yeah,” Dennis says. His brow is furrowed in earnest confusion. “What else would it be about?”

The sob comes out uncontrollably, like vomit, and Mac is immediately ashamed because Dennis has never seen him cry before. Mac has seen _Dennis_ cry plenty of times, but Mac’s not supposed to be like that. He’s not supposed to be sad. He’s supposed to be cool and tough and strong. God, his dad would be so disappointed in him right now, which only makes him cry harder. Mac puts his forehead on the steering wheel and another choked cry escapes his chest. Dennis is quiet in the seat next to him.

After a minute or so has passed, when Mac is able to catch his breath, he says, “My dad’s a dick.” The words are muffled by the steering wheel.

Rustling in the passenger’s seat. “Mine too.”

”Yeah, but at least Frank is rich.” Mac sits up, rubbing his eyes. ”At least you get to see him. At least he’s _around_.”

”I wish he wasn’t.”

”No, you don’t.”

”I really, really do.” Dennis shakes his head. It’s condescending. “You don’t know how lucky you have it, man, with your dad being locked up.”

Mac clenches his jaw and looks out the driver’s side window. This is why Dennis is a horrible person to talk to if you have a problem. But Mac keeps doing it. He always thinks he learns his lesson after Dennis _again_ makes him feel like a total idiot, and Mac swears up and down that he’s not going to try it anymore, that he’s going to keep Dennis at arm’s length, see how _he_ likes it. And there are plenty of other people to talk to. People that will be far more helpful. Or nice, at the very least. And it’s a known fact that being sad and vulnerable with a girl makes it like ten times more likely that she’ll make out with you.

But then some kind of bullshit happens, something that makes Mac upset, and for some reason, it’s always the Reynolds’ number he ends up dialing.

”Seriously though,” Dennis says with an uneasy laugh, breaking a long stretch of silence. “If your dad’s a dick, then you don’t want him around. Trust me.”

 _Trust me?_ Oh, that’s fucking rich. “Do _not_ talk about my father that way.”

”You _just_ said—”

”I was just upset. My dad’s not a dick, he’s just...got a few problems.”

”Right. A few problems,” Dennis repeats, a single skeptical eyebrow quirked: a face begging to be punched.

Mac clenches his fists in his lap. “Fuck off.”

”I’m just sayin’, if it looks like a dick and sounds like a dick...” Dennis’s shrug suggests a to-be-expected apathy towards these kinds of things.

”Well, my dad thinks _you’re_ a dick, so if you’re both dicks, then who am I supposed to believe here?”

Dennis’s expression falters the way it does when they’re acting out a scene for one of the movies they’re making and Mac says the wrong line. “Your dad thinks _I’m_ a dick?”

”Yeah.”

”How does he know who I am?”

”Because I used to write about you! In my letters!”

Dennis frowns. A car zooms by them on the street and Mac can feel the car rocking in the rush of air in its wake. “Why did you write about me?”

”Jesus Christ, you sound just like him,” Mac says. “I wrote about you because you’re my friend. Why is that so weird?! I also wrote about Charlie, no one seems to give a shit about that!”

”Does your dad think Charlie is a dick, too?”

”No.”

”Why not?”

”Probably because Charlie’s not some snobby trust fund kid who’s never had a single actual problem in his perfect fucking life,” Mac says with all the venom he can muster.

”I have problems, dude,” Dennis protests.

”Oh, _really_! Like what? CVS out of your favorite hair gel? Pool filter’s busted? Too many down pillows on your king-sized bed?”

”Okay, I get it.”

”No, no, please, tell me about your problems! Is it that your brand-new car doesn’t have seat warmers? Lobster is too hard to eat? Your dad is never around because he’s off making like millions of dollars so you never have to worry about rent or whatever rich people do to pay for their houses?”

”Ah, shut up, you know I wouldn’t complain about any of that.”

”You _have_ , though. You’ve complained about all of those things. To my face. And I just sit there like, ’Oh, I’m _so_ sorry, dude that sucks _so_ much, you’re right, your mom _should_ have given you the three hundred dollars for those sneakers instead of only one-fifty.’ I’ve never even _had_ lobster!”

”Stop it, come on—”

”Jesus Christ. You think you’re _so_ amazing, you think that people shoud worship the fucking ground you walk on, but I know what you really are. You’re just some pretty-boy faggot. I bet you suck dick, don’t you? I bet you wanna suck _my_ dick,” Mac snarls, eyeing Dennis up and down, scanning him and delivering his final verdict: “You’re _disgusting_.”

And this is the first time Mac sees it: Dennis going dead behind the eyes. That’s really the only way to describe it. It’s as though all signs of life, of emotion and feeling and humanity, vanish from Dennis’s face in an instant. His eyes go dark, almost like they stop reflecting light entirely, and it’s worse than crying or yelling or laughing anything else Dennis could have possibly done. It’s a lifeless snake in Mac’s bloody hands.

Mac says, “Dude, are you—”

”Get out of the car.”

Shit. Shit shit shit. “I’m sorry, Dennis, I didn’t—”

”Get out. Of the car.”

The command turns the air in the car to ice, and Mac doesn’t know what to do except obey. Dennis gets out too. They switch sides, but Dennis makes it before Mac does, and he locks the car before Mac can open his door.

”Hey!” Mac jiggles the door handle, bangs on the window with his fist, and Dennis doesn’t even look at him, just starts the car, revs the engine, tears off down the road. Dirt from the curb kicks up in a cloud of dust that Mac has to spit out of his mouth and wash out of his eyes with tears that he conjures up with way too little effort.

Yeah. It’s definitely way too easy to kill something.

* * * 

The next Monday, it’s like nothing happened. That’s how it is with them: at each other’s throats one day and blood brothers the next, as though the nighttime had the power to erase all of their sins against each other, and normally, Mac likes this about them, that they don’t have to deal with apologies and forgiveness, which are both things that make him feel sick to his stomach. That’s how it’s always been with them: something breaks, then it heals—Mac doesn’t know _how_ it heals, but it must, because it’s definitely not broken anymore—and then they’re back to normal.

After screaming at Dennis in the car, though—after Dennis left him in the dust to thumb his way home, a nearly impossible task that close to a state penitentiary—it didn’t feel as though something was just broken. It felt as though something had shattered completely, the shards skidding across the floor, some pieces landing underneath heavy furniture, never to be seen again until it was time for a new fridge or cabinet.

But, when Dennis saunters up to Mac and Charlie the following Mondya and says, “Dude, have you guys heard about this new movie, _The Shawshank Reflection_ or something? I heard it’s gnarly, we _have_ to see it,” Mac thinks maybe it’s not so easy to kill something after all.

* * * 

Mac has entirely forgotten about the whole thing by mid-August, which is when Dennis invites Mac and Charlie over to his house for some kind of party his parents are hosting. They have lobster for dinner. According to Mrs. Reynolds, Dennis had insisted upon it. It’s probably as close as Mac is going to get to an apology. It’s enough.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> note: there is a huge time jump between the last chapter and this one. you didn't miss a chapter. i meant to write about the like 20 years between that chapter and this one (john mulaney voice) and then i DIDN'T

**2015**

These are the facts: Luther McDonald meets Eduardo “Eddy” Sanchez at a house party in the year 2012 and they go home together. It’s not supposed to become anything more than that. It does. They go into business. Eddy has connections with distributors, Luther already has an established customer base, and they make a lot of money.

These are the facts: They work well together. Where Luther is cold and calculating, Eddy is warm and gregarious. When Eddy picks the olives off a pizza, Luther eats them. When Eddy says some other guy is bad news, Luther believes him. Luther trusts Eddy about as much as he could possibly trust another human being.

The facts are: meth-dealing is a high-adrenaline lifestyle.

The facts are: adrenaline is a hell of an aphrodisiac.

The facts are: there is no factual definition of love, nothing widely agreed upon by the law, no way to prove that what someone feels is love. So we cannot say whether or not they were in love. But these are the facts: Luther misses Eddy when they are apart.

The facts are: drug dealers should not use their product beyond what is necessary for quality assurance. But it is very difficult to do just a little bit of meth every now and then. Meth is not a once-in-a-while drug.

The facts are: Eddy and Luther are both addicts. Eddy and Luther end up owing their distributor a _lot_ of money. Eddy and Luther tell their distributor that they were robbed. The distributor tells them to “Take care of it.” Every drug dealer knows what that means.

The facts are: Eddy and Luther smoke the last of their stash; Eddy tears a stop sign off of its posts and uses it slit an innocent man’s throat; they will blame this man for the robbery; the sirens start up way too quickly and they are way too close by; someone tipped them off to the cops; Luther tells Eddy to run; Eddy is nowhere to be seen.

The facts are: Luther was framed.

The facts are: Luther will not rat out Eddy. He wants to, because he’s angry and wants to ruin Eddy’s life. But he doesn’t, because he’s stupid and weak and has let himself _care_. But in the end, it doesn’t matter what Luther does, because Mac sticks his nose where it doesn’t belong and Eddy is arrested, charged, convicted anyway, and there are a million reasons why it would be bad if he got sent to Eastern State Correctional.

The facts are: Eddy gets locked up in another prison. He has a life sentence; Luther’s got about 40 years. They’re never going to see each other again.

Luther is _never_ going to forgive Mac.

* * * 

**2017**

It’s 2017, and Mac briefly becomes Gay Rich Mac when he wins $10,000 dollars after defeating the rest of the gang for the ownership rights to a lottery ticket. Then the gang forces him to use the money to pay the arbitration fees, so then he’s just Gay Mac. He acts like he’s pissed about it, but in the end, the money doesn’t matter. If he’s being honest, he’s been looking for an excuse to do this for a while, and he meant it when he told the gang it felt pretty good.

It felt _great_ , actually. He still feels great walking home from the arbitration. He feels _awesome_. He keeps feeling awesome throughout the next day, and the next week, and Mac starts to think that maybe this is how he’s going to get to feel for the rest of his life, wonders if maybe this is how other people feel all the time. If that’s true, he wishes he’d done this a _lot_ sooner.

The next time Mac sees them all together, which is later that same day, it’s exactly like it has been since 2006. Not like Mac expected anything different. The gang had been at pains to assure him that they wouldn’t treat him differently if he came out, but that was never a worry for him in the first place. Why would it be? Even if they _did_ , it wouldn’t be a bad thing, because how could any of them treat each other worse than they already do? All of them are experts at pretending things haven’t changed. Well, no, that’s not really it. It’s more like they’re experts at knitting changes into the fabric of the gang so neatly that no one would ever guess that it hadn’t always been like this, that even the five of them would forget eventually.

There are, of course, a _few_ changes. For example, he can openly criticize Dee’s taste in men. And Frank sometimes asks him stupid questions about the logistics of gay sex—that’s actually something he’s always done, but now Mac feels like he has the authority to answer. (Although not the experience, but that’s never stopped him before.)

Mac hangs out with Charlie the most, though, because Charlie is the one that changes the least, although Mac doesn’t figure out why until a couple weeks after when the two of them get it in their heads to collect cans and bottles from public trash cans to turn them in for the refund, only to discover that Pennsylvania doesn’t have a deposit program. They wind up getting high in Charlie’s apartment among a truly extraordinary amount of bottles and cans, and weed always makes Mac kind of sappy (which is actually why he doesn’t like it too much) and he ends up apologizing to Charlie for trying to sleep with the Waitress all those years ago.

”Oh, dude, I never even gave a shit about,” Charlie says through a mouth full of Cheetos.

”Yeah, you did,” Mac insists. “You wanted me to beat up whoever was sleeping with her!”

”That’s when I didn’t know it was _you_. And you hadn’t even banged her yet, so. Shrek-mate.”

Mac lets “shrek-mate” slide for now and asks, “But wouldn’t that make you even angrier?”

”Nah. I knew you wouldn’t do it.”

”I would’ve!”

”Well, you wouldn’t have enjoyed it.”

”I might’ve!”

”Not really,” Charlie says. “Because you’re gay.”

”But I wasn’t gay _then_.”

”That’s not how it works, dude.”

”Since when are _you_ the authority on how being gay works?”

”Well, you’ve been gay _at least_ since then, because that’s when Dennis and I figured it out.”

”What?! How could you have _possibly_ known back then?”

”Oh, we heard you talkin’ about, I dunno, pretending to be me and the Waitress pretending to be Dennis? And so then we were like, ’Oh...he wants to bang us, he’s in love with us, he must be gay.’”

”But we were just pretending to be you and Dennis to break into your apartment!”

”That’s not relevant.”

”How is that not relevant?!”

”Because no matter what you were or weren’t doing in my long johns, a lot of shit about you started to make sense once we figured that out. And I guess I never really questioned it. I actually used to get super confused when you’d talk about banging chicks and being straight and shit, because I’d forget you didn’t know.”

”Oh, gee, well, thanks for the heads up, man.”

”You are not _seriously_ trying to say I didn’t tell you, are you? Because I told you. A _lot_. We all did.”

”Well—” Mac tries to think of a retort but his eyes catch on the bright orange bag of hot Cheetos out of Charlie’s

”Hey!”

Shoving a handful of neon orange crumbs into his mouth, Mac says, “Shut up.” But he feels good about things.

* * * 

Weirdly, Mac also ends up spending a lot of time with Frank in the days following the arbitration. They start playing this virtual reality war game together, and it’s fun and addictive and very easy to stay up all night playing it, which means that Mac doesn’t have to be in Dee’s apartment for very long, which means he doesn’t have to see Dennis too much.

Mac is avoiding Dennis because Dennis is the one that changes the most after the arbitration. Which comes as kind of a surprise to Mac. Apparently both Dennis and Charlie had known Mac was gay, and Charlie’s being totally chill, so why is Dennis being so weird?

It dawns on Mac that Charlie would legitimately forget that Mac didn’t know, so Charlie never really acted like it was a big deal. Dennis, on the other hand, couldn’t _stand_ Mac being in the closet. Even Mac knew that. Dennis was always the one who argued the most against Mac’s homophobia, who pushed him the hardest to come out. So if anything had to change between them, Mac would’ve assumed it would be for the better. But it’s not.

It’s not like things are any _worse_ , either. It’s just _stilted_ , in a very strange and unidentifiable way. There’s something plastic about it, something fake, like Tom Hanks in _The Polar Express_. It’s _close_ to the real thing, all of the basic elements are in the correct place, but something’s _definitely_ off and the end product is _very_ disturbing.

The virtual reality game starts to get to him, though. The images are fake, he knows they’re fake, but they’re upsetting, and he sees the game when he closes his eyes, and that’s when the dreams start: shooting his father dead. Being in the old apartment. Dennis dancing shirtless. Dennis almost kissing him.

When he finally wakes up in bed with Dee and Old Black Man, he finds that Dennis is _actually_ dancing shirtless in the living room, lookin’ like a goddamn _snack_ in his tight jeans and red baseball hat, and all at once Mac puts it together that his dream was a _premonition_ , which means that Dennis actually _does_ want to kiss him, and it certainly is looking that way, with how he’s dancing closer and closer, and then—

He slams the door shut in Mac’s face.

Mac picks up the landline in Dee’s room with a deeply disturbing mixture of images swimming around in his head: Dennis’s lips and eyes and bare chest, his dead father lying on the ground. He dials Frank’s number and tells him that they have to stop playing the game. He has PTSD, he must have PTSD. Frank tells him they’ll figure something out in the morning.

Mac doesn’t let himself go back to sleep.

* * * 

Eventually, Mac figures out that he doesn’t have PTSD, he’s just sleep-deprived, which is, frankly, awesome news. The images from his dream are still stuck in his mind the way that a bright light sticks in your eyes even after you look away, but who gives a shit? Because these past few days, Mac hasn’t been paying _super_ close attention to anyone but himself, but it seems like something weird has been going on with all of them—Frank and the frog kid, Dennis and the librarian, Dee and her stripper boyfriend and the stripper boyfriend’s adult daughter, and Charlie’s been calling Dennis “Daddy,” which is a whole can of worms that even the most experienced therapists wouldn’t touch with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole—and really, what can you do about any of that except drink? Everything’s so much more fun that way.

And everything goes back to normal, just like it always does.

Well, almost everything.

It’s in danger of becoming a trend, how Mac always has to tack on “except Dennis” whenever he’s inclined to make a generalization about how well things are going. But after the gang chooses to ignore their trauma in favor of getting drunk, things are somehow even _more_ off between Mac and Dennis, and for maybe the first time ever, Mac wonders if maybe that “talking it out” thing has some merit. Because Mac really wants to know what the fuck was going through Dennis’s head that night in Dee’s living room. And Mac is many things, but he is _not_ a mind reader.

Except Mac can never figure out the right words, and he never finds a good time to ask, and time goes by, and then it feels too late. So maybe words aren’t the right approach. Mac’s always been a man of action, anyway.

So, one night he takes the gang’s laptop, googles “how to get on the dark web,” takes diligent notes, hacks his way in, accidentally orders a bunch of Ritalin which the seller _won’t_ let him return even though Mac _has_ the receipt, but apparently the dark web does not have a customer service department, and time is running out. Finally, he finds the perfect thing: a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, complete with rocket, sent from Russia. It’s about 3,000 dollars; expedited shipping is an extra 800 dollars; but it’s worth it to see the look on Dennis’s face when he finally opens it on Valentine’s Day.

If Mac is honest, though, he’s a little bit confused by Dennis’s reaction. It was a good reaction, definitely, but he really thought Dennis would be more, like...happy? Like, “Dude, this is so badass!” You know, smiling and shit? Upbeat? Instead, it almost looks like Dennis is holding back _tears_. Which is weird, because Dennis doesn’t have feelings.

Two weeks later, Dennis tells the gang he has a son and needs help shaking off the baby mama.

Two days later, Dennis is gone.

* * * 

If anyone doubts the theory of relativity, if anyone thinks that time is a universal constant independent of any and all circumstances, then Dennis thinks they should spend a year in North Dakota and get back to him.

Objectively speaking, the winter days are much shorter here than they were in Philadelphia. It’s further north, so it makes sense. But they feel so much longer. The nights do too, and the nights _are_ longer.

The summer days, on the other hand, _are_ longer. And yet they go by in the blink of an eye.

Above all else, the days are _quiet_ , no matter the season.

Dennis learns that fields of wheat and corn, stretching out as far as he can see, can be deafening when they rustle in the slightest breeze. He learns that wind _actually_ howls, that it’s not just a saying but a disturbingly accurate description. He learns that snow makes a sound when it lands on more snow, a soft _plip_ , or maybe a _spith_ , or sometimes a _thpip_. He learns that he doesn’t even have to listen very hard to hear it. There is so much more to hear when you have the time to stop and listen. And when there aren’t four raging idiots screaming in your ear 24/7. It takes Dennis a while to figure out how he feels about it, but eventually, he lands on it:

It’s fucking bullshit, is how he feels.

It’s boredom personified, it’s the suburbs times a thousand, it’s Dennis’s personal hell and worst nightmare combined. Time used to feel like a semi-truck barreling towards him on the freeway, the driver not drunk or asleep at the wheel but full of malicious intent and targeting Dennis specifically. Time was a precious resource, always running out, always something to conserve, to try and slow down.

But in North Dakota, time is something even more frightening, stretching out to the horizon and beyond, miles and miles of endless monotony, the days laid out clearly and tediously in front of him, one after the other. Sure, summer goes a little faster, winter goes a little slower, but it all averages out to a dull pace that pulls Dennis forward inexorably towards a bland and tasteless future.

It’s a climate ripe for both fantasies and nightmares, and Dennis is unable to resist imagining what might be happening back at Paddy’s in his absence. He pictures the gang weeping, mourning his absence. He worries that they don’t miss him at all. Realistically, he sees them somewhere in between the two extremes, missing him but moving on. Maybe they’d even try to recruit a new member. Maybe they’d try to expand into new territory by getting someone who’s the opposite of Dennis. Like a chick.

Terrible, Dennis-less schemes come to him in dreams made feverish by the small space heater that warms up his studio apartment. In the weirdest one, the gang tries to incite some kind of political riot, and Donald Trump is involved somehow, and also re-labeled bottles of wine. Mac makes his “famous” mac and cheese but it’s so disgusting that even Charlie won’t touch it. And also Charlie is like, married to the waitress, and they’re trying to have a baby. At one point in the dream, Mac—who is inexplicably and ridiculously ripped in the dream—gets a sex doll that looks almost exactly like Dennis, but it’s _not_ Dennis, because Dennis is very solidly an observer in this dream, _but_ the gang can also somehow hear his actual thoughts. And then there’s an orgy, or something, and everyone fucks the sex doll, including the Waitress (but excluding Dee, which Dennis is thankful for). At one point there’s a tuba, for some reason. And then Dennis _becomes_ the sex doll, and then the sex doll becomes the _tuba_ , so _Dennis_ is the tuba. And that’s when he jolts awake, heart racing and drenched in sweat. He wants to tell someone about it, but no one there would understand _just_ how weird it was, because they wouldn’t know the cast of characters.

Dennis fantasizes about striding into the bar casually, saving the day somehow, and the gang accepting him back into the fold with no questions asked. They cheer and laugh and he calls Dee a “bird” and it’s like he never left. He tells Mac he looks fat—he’s pretty sure Mac has gained weight in his absence, given the guy’s tendency towards stress eating.

Meanwhile, he’s taking care of Brian some nights and on the weekends. Dennis doesn’t think of himself as a particularly good father, but he _does_ enjoy the superiority that comes from at least _trying_ , which he’s sure the rest of the gang wouldn’t even do.

Brian being at his place becomes more frequent as time goes on; it’s not like he and Mandy have a custody agreement or anything, it’s just that sometimes Mandy will knock on the door and drop Brian off without any real reason why. He does notice, though, that Mandy isn’t looking so good anymore: blood-shot eyes, yellowish skin, gaunt cheekbones. Maybe she’s sick, he thinks, but she doesn’t tell him anything. And he doesn’t ask questions. He’s got plenty of his own secrets. Just because there’s a tiny living thing that shares their DNA doesn’t mean they have to be close.

And then Dennis gets a call.


	5. Chapter 5

**2018**

Mac stumbles up the stairs to his apartment at around 9 o’clock in the morning. He’s not as hungover as he thought he’d be, but he feels sweaty and his entire body aches in that way it does after really good sex, and he can’t wait to take a shower and collapse onto his bed. He unlocks the door to his apartment, opens it, and freezes.

There’s a _baby_ sitting on the floor.

Right in front of the couch.

The baby stares at Mac. Just stares. And then it turns his attention to some kind of iPad-like device in its lap that’s playing some video with loud and silly voices.

Mac looks over his shoulder, and then back at the baby.

”Hi,” Mac says dumbly.

The kid doesn’t look up.

”Who—” Mac stops himself. He was gonna ask the kid who he was, but do kids that small even _know_ who they are? Did _he_ know his name when he was 2 years old—or 4—or 8, or however old this tiny person was? Can the kid even _talk_?

”Do you speak English?” Mac says slowly.

The kid doesn’t respond. Shit, not only is there a random kid in his apartment, but it’s a _foreign_ kid? Oh god, that must mean the kid is part of some human trafficking scheme—and now Mac’s going to have to be a part of that?

”Shit.”

Mac whirls around to find the source of the voice behind him. And then he feels like he just took a huge dip on a roller coaster. Because standing right there is Dennis, in a T-shirt and sweatpants and—dear God— _socks with sandals_ , carrying a few grocery bags.

Mac stares dumbly at Dennis for a beat, and then his eyebrows shoot up. “Oh!” Mac says, turning to the kid on the floor, and looking at Dennis, grinning. “That’s Brian?!”

”Yeah,” Dennis says. “Can I—” he motions toward the door.

”Oh, of course,” Mac steps out of the way, shuts the door, and crouches down next to Brian as Dennis sets the bags on the table. “Shit, dude, he’s _huge_!”

”Thirty-six pounds,” Dennis says, preoccupied with putting things in the fridge.

”I did _not_ recognize him, man,” Mac said. “I thought he was, like, a Russian slave.”

”Of course you did.”

Mac stands up. “Wait, what are you doing back in Philly?”

Dennis is standing with his hands on his hips, looking down at the ground. “Jesus. Okay. There’s no way for me to say this without this sounding like...like I made it up for some movie, or something,” Dennis says. “But, uh. Mandy died.”

”Oh my god.”

”Yeah.”

”How did it happen?”

Nervously, Dennis glances over at Brian before answering, his voice lowered. “Overdose.”

”No way.”

”Yep.”

”On what?”

”Vicodin, or something? Oxycontin, maybe. I can’t remember. Opiates.”

”Shit.” Mac stares at Dennis, mouth open but no more words come out. What is there to say, really? Mac didn’t know Mandy. He doesn’t even know how well _Dennis_ knew Mandy. Were they living together in North Dakota? Were they, like, _dating_? Did they get married? Was Dennis in love? Did he even like her?

Dennis answers Mac’s questions before he can even ask them. “I mean, it’s not like—you know. I mean, I hardly knew her. I barely saw her, except when we were, you know, trading the kid back and forth.”

”Shit. I’m so sorry.”

”It’s not your fault.”

”I would’ve never pegged her for a pill popper.”

Dennis flinches a bit. “Could you not—in front of him?” he says under his breath, nodding at Brian.

”Ah shit, I’m sorry.”

”It’s fine.”

”So he _can_ talk, though?”

”Kind of? I don’t know. He makes noises.”

Mac nods. Doesn’t know what to say to that, either. “So...when did it happen?”

”Two months ago.”

Mac looks back at Brian and wonders if he knows, if he’s hurting. Babies are such tiny perfect things. It’s the trauma of living that makes us imperfect, the tiny everyday tragedies mixed in with rare large-scale disasters that break us down and reshape us into the people that we become. Dennis might not be _heartbroken_ about Mandy directly, but he and Mac are both in the presence of a kind of rebirth. Whatever else Brian’s life is going to look like, this will always be an indelible part of it, a major fork in the road with infinite, unpredictable routes ahead.

But right now, there are all sorts of boings and hoots coming from the tablet in Brian’s lap. Cautiously, Mac tests the waters with a joke: “This seems like an appropriate soundtrack for this conversation.”

Dennis rolls his eyes, but not without affection—the joke was a good move. “Don’t judge me, dude.”

”Judge you? For what?”

”For being one of those lazy parents who sticks their kid in front of a screen to shut them up,” Dennis says. “But I swear to god, those noises he makes? I mean, this kid is probably going to make sound effects for clown shows some day.”

”Awww, that’s kind of cute, though.”

”Yeah, it _sounds_ cute, until he’s been doing it at the top of his lungs for three hours straight. And the—the iPad thing or whatever it is, it shuts him up.”

”I’m not judging you. I was raised by television and I turned out just fine.”

Dennis raises an eyebrow at Mac, and then pointedly calls out, “Okay, Brian, that’s enough time with the iPad, buddy.” He walks over with a box of cheerios and scoops up his son by the scruff of his shirt, sitting him on the couch. He sits down next to him, opens the box of Cheerios, and offers a handful to Brian.

”So...you’re, like, back?” Mac asks. “Like, here, in the apartment?”

”I mean,” Dennis says, munching on some Cheerios himself and shrugging. “I was gonna kinda wait and see. Y’know. What you’d want.”

”What I want,” Mac repeats, the words sounding foreign. Since when does Dennis care what someone else wants?

”I know a kid is a lot,” Dennis explains. “Especially this one. He’s sort of an asshole.”

”Like father, like son.”

”Yeah, you’re tellin’ me. So—yeah, you know what, I’ll just get my own place. We’ll just stay here for, like, a week.”

”Oh. Sure.” But...”Does he...wear diapers?”

”Yeah,” Dennis says. “I think we’re getting pretty close to potty training though. I’m not looking forward to that.”

”Charlie will do it,” Mac says, but his mind is elsewhere. A kid _is_ a lot, but Mac can’t find a good reason why Dennis and Brian _shouldn’t_ stay here, and honestly, he _wants_ to live with Dennis again, even if it means having a baby in the house. “No, you know what? I can’t just kick you and your infant son out to fend for yourselves on the streets of Philadelphia.”

”Brian isn’t an infant, Mac, he’s three years—”

”But,” Mac says quickly, finger raised. “I don’t wanna burp him or anything, okay? Seeing people burp babies triggers my gag reflex and—”

”He’s _three_ , he doesn’t need to be burped!” Dennis says. “Jesus Christ, don’t you know _anything_ about kids?”

”Why would I?”

Dennis looks off to the side, frowning as he thinks about it. then shrugs in concession. “Fair.”

* * * 

So Brian and Dennis move into the apartment.

Mac takes the dildo off of the Ass Pounder 4000 because he and Dennis agree that they don’t want Brian to be twenty years old when he realizes what that weird contraption was when he was three years old and living in a mediocre apartment in South Philly with his dad and...his dad’s gay roommate. Or gay friend. Or gay uncle. Or...gay dad...?

That’s where that thought had ended in Mac’s mind, because he was trying to see the world through Brian’s eyes, and he wondered just how this little person saw him.

The facts are:

Mac and Dennis take Brian to the playground on the weekends. Dennis sits on a bench in the shade and Mac pushes the kid on the swings or helps him climb the jungle gym.

Mac and Dennis take Brian out to dinner every month. They go to Applebee’s or Chili’s or some other cheap, family-style restaurant. Mac and Dennis cut up Brian’s chicken strips and order him apple juice and never clean the table because that’s the waiters’ job and what the hell are they paying the restaurant for if the waiters aren’t going to clean up a stupid table?

Mac and Dennis stay up in shifts when Brian comes down with some kind of horrible stomach virus and a dangerously high fever. Later, when Mac and Dennis are both violently ill themselves, Mac becomes deliriously proud when he realizes he didn’t gag once while he was rubbing Brian’s back, trying to soothe him as he puked helplessly into a bucket.

Mac and Dennis have dance parties with Brian. They listen to to disco, 80s glam rock femme shit, Bob Dylan, Taylor Swift, Prince, the Beatles, Creed. But Brian’s favorite is Beyonce. Neither Mac or Dennis can figure it out, but there’s something about the quality of the song “Single Ladies” that sends Brian into high gear, jumping around and shrieking his version of the lyrics. (Brian’s version of the lyrics are, obviously, mostly gibberish.) Mac and Dennis hate the song after a while, but damn if they don’t put it on whenever Brian asks, and damn if Mac and Dennis don’t spend hours trying to quietly learn the choreography after Brian falls asleep.

Mac and Dennis both try several different tactics to stop Brian from slamming his head into cabinet doors, which he does whenever he’s happy, angry, sad, scared, hungry, hyper, or bored. Which is almost 100% of the time he’s awake. So Mac goes to the library and takes out a huge stack of books about kids with problems or whatever—he’s got a book on autism, one on OCD, one on ADHD, and a couple just about general behavioral problems. It causes a huge fight when Dennis sees them, he thinks Mac is judging him as a parent, but Mac notices that post-its are appearing in the books that he knows he didn’t put there, and slowly but surely, Brian slams his head into the cabinet doors less and less.

Mac tells Brian that he loves him at least once a day. Not like he’s checking it off of a to-do list. He just says it when it comes up. He also tells Brian that Dennis loves him too, but some people say “I love you” in different ways, so both of them have to learn how Dennis says it. And then Dennis is really confused when Brian starts saying “I love you too, dad,” every time he tells Brian to brush his goddamn teeth. It makes Dennis feel lost inside; unmoored and so far out to sea that he can’t see the shore. How do you brush off someone’s “I love you” if you love them too?

It’s far too easy to make a kid. It shouldn’t be something you can do by accident.

One day, Dennis overhears Brian say to Mac, “I love you,” and Mac’s response is the ultimate gift, something Dennis can actually bring himself to say to Brian: “Back at ya.” It’s not enough, Dennis knows it’s not enough. But it’s something close.

* * * 

”Hey man, that dance your kid did? No homo, but I gotta be real with you—that shit made me cry, honest to god. You must be damn proud.”

Luther knows his cellmate, Jack, is talking to him. He keeps his eyes shut anyway. Pretends he’s asleep.

”Nah.” His other cellmate, Marco. “He left in the middle, didn’t you see?”

”He did?” Jack asks. “What, is he some kinda homophobic or somethin’?”

”Can’t be, I hear he had a boy toy on the outside.”

”No way. _Luther’s_ a homo? Ha! Must run in the family, right, Luth?”

”No,” Luther grits out. It’s one thing to sleep with men inside prison, where it’s understood as a kind of unfortunate necessity; another thing entirely to do it when you’re a free man. “Don’t listen to rumors.”

”It’s okay if you are,” Marco says. “We won’t tell.” But Luther knows it’s leverage.

”Fuck off, dipshit,” Luther spits.

Jack says, “So you _are_ a homophobic.”

”Sure.”

”And that’s why you left?”

”Sure.”

Marco lets out a low whistle. “Damn, that’s cold-blooded. You know, if I had a kid—”

Marco and Jack keep talking, but Luther tunes them out.

Luther has this recurring dream, has been having it for a while now, we’re talking decades. In the dream, he has this dog, but he’s completely forgotten about it. It’s locked up somewhere, in a cage or in the basement of some house or left tied up outside on the street; Luther knows where he left it, and he knows in that way you just know things in dreams that it’ll still be there; it’s not _lost_ , he’s just forgotten about it, and now he’s afraid to find it because it _must_ be dead by now. The dreams are frantic and somehow terrifying, way out of proportion to how Luther would actually feel, because he doesn’t really give a shit about dogs. He rolled his eyes at _Marley and Me_. But Luther had always felt that it was probably one of those bullshit symbolic dreams; that the dog was actually _him_.

Now, Luther isn’t so sure about that, because the feeling he has in the pit of his stomach right now is very much like that feeling he gets in the dream.

He hates Mac. Hates him because he just wasn’t the kind of son that Luther could give a shit about—and somehow that’s _Luther’s_ fault? And even in those very few times when Mac actually _did_ make Luther proud...seeing Mac smile brought up some kind of indescribable emotion, a big feeling that he had never felt before, that he only felt around Mac. It was not quite fear, but that was probably its nearest neighbor. And Luther McDonald is many things, but he is _not_ a coward. Mac’s existence turned Luther into something he was never, ever meant to be.

Eastern State Correctional Facility is filled with murderers, rapists, thiefs, drug dealers, and gang members, but Luther has never met someone he’s hated more than Mac. If Luther believed in God, he would pray that Mac never has to suffer the indignity of having a son of his own.

Instead, he writes a letter.

* * * 

When Mac comes home the day before Philly Pride, looking upset and also for some reason very damp, Dennis doesn’t ask questions, because usually he doesn’t have to; usually Mac can’t keep his stupid mouth shut.

Apparently not today, though. He just walks into their bedroom—where Dennis is already hiding himself, with the lights off and the curtains shut—goes straight into the bathroom where he takes a very, very long shower. Dennis doesn’t know how long because he falls asleep before he comes back out.

Through context clues, all Dennis can figure out over the next few days is that Mac came out to his father, and that it didn’t go well, and that it involved modern dance (because of course it did).

Dennis knows he should feel sad. Normal people would feel upset for Mac. Even Dee and Frank and Charlie are all upset for Mac in their own ways, but Dennis is _relieved_. Tentatively relieved, but relieved all the same. Maybe this will be the final straw; maybe Mac will be able to let go of his daddy issues once and for all.

At any rate, they never hold onto their shit for long, so whatever funk Mac is in will pass eventually.

About a month and a half after Pride, a letter appears in their mailbox with a familiar return address that makes the bottom drop out of Dennis’s stomach: East County Correctional Facility.

Standing there in the lobby of their apartment building, one of the greenish fluorescent lights flickering sporadically, Dennis reads the letter. And reads it again. And again. And then he holds it in front of him, boths hands gripping the top of the paper, ready to tear it right down the middle and throw it in the trash.

He can’t bring himself to do it.

He folds it up until he physically cannot fold it any smaller. He takes a little pot of setting powder, cringes as he dumps it in the toilet, puts the letter in the pot, puts the pot in a travel makeup bag, puts the bag in his makeup drawer in the bathroom, and moves past it.


	6. Chapter 6

**2019**

It happens on a decidedly boring day. Mac is watching TV, Dennis is fiddling with his phone, and Brian is playing with his tablet, sitting on the couch between them. There’s some kind of explosion playing on the tablet and Brian laughs. “Dad, watch this,” he says.

Dennis doesn’t respond.

”Dad!”

”Yeah, what is it, bud?” Dennis mutters, not looking away from his phone. Brian is obsessed with some YouTube channel where they just blow shit up and shows Mac and Dennis videos of explosions about fifteen times per day. Mac thinks it’s cool; Dennis insists that while it’s _kind of_ cool, it’s not fifteen times a day cool.

”No, not you,” Brian says, annoyed. “ _Other_ dad.” And he scoots over on the couch to show Mac something on the tablet.

Mac looks at Brian, then at Dennis, his eyes wide. Dennis is looking at Brian as though the kid just said “fuck”—except Brian already knows the word “fuck” (how could he not?) and says it with great frequency.

”I, uh—” Mac doesn’t know what to say. He shouldn’t let Brian call him “dad.” Right? Because he isn’t his dad. And he doesn’t want the kid to get confused or fucked up or, like, forget about his mom. Mac is too choked up to say anything at all, so he just watches Brian’s video of a cement truck being detonated, although it’s blurry because of the tears stinging his eyes.

Mac hazards a glance up at Dennis, who is looking at the two of them, his face utterly transformed. Mac hasn’t seen that look on his face since he gave him the RPG three years ago. (The memory is one that sneaks up on his thoughts and plucks a single, bittersweet note every now and then. Mac hates remembering it; he loves remembering it. It’s like having a cut in your mouth, one that you can’t stop touching with your tongue, just to see if it still hurts. It always does. Because no matter what it meant in the moment, it wasn’t enough to make Dennis stay. It was never going to be enough.)

Dennis doesn’t like to talk about emotional shit. Mac _does_ like to talk about emotional shit, but he’s not good at it. So they spend the next few days very much _not talking_ about how Brian called Mac “dad” until it kind of falls into the background. Brian still calls Mac “dad” sometimes, but it gets less weird every time it happens.

And then one night, like a month later, Brian shakes Dennis awake. “Hey, dad,” Brian says. “Wake up. I got a question.”

”What is it?” Dennis says.

”How am I supposed to tell you and Dad apart if you’re _both_ Dad?” Brian isn’t nervous or worried or anything, he’s just profoundly confused at this weird inconsistency he’s discovered.

”This couldn’t wait until morning?”

”Maybe I can call him Daddy.”

”Well, why don’t you call Mac something else other than Dad. Like Mac.”

”Mac Daddy?”

”...don’t call him Mac Daddy.”

”Why not?”

”Trust me.”

”What about, like, um. What about Kevin?” Brian muses. “Oh oh oh! _You’re_ Kevin and _he’s_ Dad.”

”What? I’m not _Kevin_ ,” Dennis sits up, highly offended. “I’m ’Dad’! I’m _your_ dad.”

”No, _Dad_ is my dad, _you’re_ Kevin.”

”I’m not Kevin! I’m Dennis!”

”Who’s Dennis?”

”Who’s—are you kidding me? _I’m_ Dennis.”

Brian squints at Dennis suspiciously. “I don’t think so.”

”My name is Dennis.”

”Your name is Dad.”

”Well—yes, to YOU I’m Dad. But everyone else calls me Dennis. How did you not notice that?”

”So I guess I’ll call him Dennis, then.”

”Who?”

”Dad. Or Mac. I’ll call him Dennis and you can be Kevin.”

” _What_?”

”Well, all my friends call their parents Mom and Dad. And I said I call you ’Dad’ but I call Mac ’Mac’ and they said that was weird, and then my friend Sam, she said she has a stepdad who she calls Chris, but Mac isn’t my stepdad, he’s my _actual_ dad because he’s been my dad forever and Chris has only been Sam’s stepdad since last Christmas. Okay so I thought maybe it was weird that I call him Mac but I call you Dad, but maybe it’s not weird if I call _both_ of you not ’Dad,’ but I’ll call Mac ’Dennis’ and I’ll call you ’Kevin.’”

Dennis gapes at Brian. There is just so much wrong there, he doesn’t even know where to begin. How is he supposed to explain any of this to a four-year-old? What is his responsibility here? That’s what has always bothered Dennis about the whole parenting thing, why he never wanted children in the first place—well, okay, the first reason was that a kid would cramp his style. But second reason was that the simplest, tiniest, weirdest thing could damage them for the rest of their fucking lives and then the kid would turn into a nightmare. And, what’s worse, it was impossible to know what might do it, even more impossible to know how to avoid it. And _especially_ impossible at two in the morning.

Finally, Dennis says, “That doesn’t make any sense.”

”Yes it _does_!” Brian shouts.

”Okay! Shh, shh—”

Mac stirs next to Dennis. “Whas’ wrong?”

”Nothing, go back to sleep,” Dennis says. Mac grunts, and Dennis turns back to Brian, whispering, “Okay, yeah, sure, fine, I’m Kevin, can you _please_ go back to sleep?”

”Um. Could I sleep in your bed?”

”Only if you shut up,” Dennis says.

”Okay.” Brian climbs over Dennis like he’s a piece of furniture, ignoring Dennis’s _ows_ and _ouches_ , and snuggles down in the space between Mac and Dennis; in his sleep, Mac wraps an arm around Brian and pulls him close.

* * * 

The way it has always gone with Dennis is like this.

There are times when Mac thinks about him every waking moment. It’s where his mind goes when he’s bored. It’s what he thinks about before falling asleep. It’s what he prays for once he figures out that God’s okay with all that. There are times when it hurts so much that Mac is sure he’s not going to survive it. He always does.

And then there are times when it fades into the background. It’s there if you’re looking for it, but it’s not pushing its way into everything, it’s not distracting, and it doesn’t hurt.

And then there are periods, sometimes months long, when something makes Mac look around and realize that the feeling hasn’t shown its face at all. Sometimes it happens because Mac briefly becomes obsessed with someone else. Sometimes it happens because Dennis is just being a dick. More often than not, Mac doesn’t know what causes it.

* * * 

Honestly, the idea has been in Dennis’s mind for a while now. It’s purely a practical issue. _He’s_ always the one taking Brian to the doctor and going to parent-teacher conferences and signing permission slips. He has to be, like, legally. And as much as Mac helps with almost everything else, Dennis can’t help but feel like Mac would be better equipped to calm Brian down when it’s time to get his booster shots.

The conclusion to be drawn there is that Mac has things to offer as a father that Dennis just can’t. Although Mac had anger issues when they were young, he has acquired a simple sincerity as he’s aged. He laughs at bad jokes. He sings off-key. When he makes fun of someone, there’s no malice behind it. (Dee doesn’t count.) It’s almost as if once he stopped having to be so defensive, hiding who he really was, he gave up on his other fights, because he saw that they didn’t make him happy either; that, in fact, they never had. Dennis can’t remember the last time Mac looked at him with anything close to hatred.

And there’s another conclusion to be made from that.

Dennis is sitting in the back office of Paddy’s and has been on hold for about half an hour, long enough for him to have lost his temper, find it again, and then start to lose it once more. Finally, the awful muzak crackles to stop and a woman answers on the other end. Suddenly, Dennis is nervous, the back of his neck feeling like an ocean in a hurricane. He’s shaking a little.

”Thank you for waiting. This is Sandra, how can I help you?”

”Hi...uh, Sandra, I’ve got a question, so—”

”And what’s your name?”

”Oh—it’s Dennis,” he says.

”Okay, Dennis, how can I help you?”

”Right um—so, I have a son, he’s almost six, and—his—the mom, she died.” Jesus, why is this so hard to get out?

”I’m sorry to hear that,” Sandra says. She doesn’t sound sorry. Okay, a little sorry, _maybe_. Not important. Push through it.

”Anyway so he’s been living with me and my, uh—my roommate? Oh, his name is Mac,” Dennis adds. “If you, if you need to know.”

”Sure,” she says, urging him to continue.

”Anyway, they’ve, um...” Dennis pauses. He’s having trouble getting enough breath.

After a moment, Sarah says, “Did I lose you?”

”No, no,” Dennis says. “I’m still here.” Good lord, this is ridiculous. Just spit it out. “He wants to adopt him. Mac. Wants to adopt my son. My roommate wants to adopt my son. So how do I go about that?”

”Oh,” Sandra says. “So you and your roommate are ’partners’?”

”Not like that,” Dennis says. “Not with quotes around it.”

”Oh,” she says again, sounding more confused.

”No, we’re just friends, okay?” Dennis says. “Not—not—so what’s the next step? For my roommate to adopt my son?”

”Well, I have to say, it’s not very often that we get situations like this,” Sandra says.

”Like what?”

”A father wanting someone who’s just a friend to adopt his child...it’s not really expressly allowed.”

”That sounds like discrimination against single people to me,” Dennis says.

”I’m sorry, it’s—that’s the law.”

” _What_ law? There’s some special law that says friends can’t adopt their friends’ children?”

”No,” Sandra says slowly. “But it _does_ say that if there is at least one parent who is alive _and_ has full custody of the child, the only way another person can adopt the child is if they are married to the parent.”

Dennis rubs his forehead. “I’m sorry, that was just a whole lot of words. What’s—what’s the bottom line here? Are you telling me it’s impossible?”

”Well, it’s not _quite_ impossible,” Sandra says. “Basically, I’m saying that your roommate could adopt your son if you and your roommate were legally married.”

Suddenly Dennis wants nothing more than to get off the phone. He can’t think of a single thing to say to Sandra, so he just takes his phone away from his ear and presses the red button on the screen to hang up.

His mind is all noise, no information—like a TV playing static, the screen frenzied bits of white and black, the sound hissing and roaring. The back office feels too hot suddenly. Dennis stands up and walks out into the bar, making a beeline for the door.

”What, were you jackin’ off back there?” Frank says as he strides by. “Hey, where’re you going?”

Dennis leaves the bar, gets into the Range Rover, and just fucking drives.

* * * 

”Where’s Kevin?” Brian asks. He and Mac are sitting at the dinner table, eating Big Mac and Cheese—which is when Mac makes a bunch of mac and cheese and puts it in a mixing bowl and he and Brian eat it with big mixing spoons. Mac only makes it on nights when Dennis isn’t around; he tells Brian to keep it a secret. (Mac doesn’t actually care if Dennis knows, but what can he say, he’s a simple man and it’s stupid fun to be in cahoots with a five-and-a-half-year-old).

”I still don’t know, dude,” Mac says. “I haven’t gotten any new info since you asked me ten minutes ago.”

”How _do_ you get info?” Brian asks, licking his mixing spoon.

”I guess someone would call me,” Mac shrugs. “Or text me, or something.”

”Did _you_ call _him_?” Brian asks.

”Yep.” Mac wants Brian to stop asking questions. He’s trying not to let himself get worried. It’s unusual to not hear from Dennis for so long, but...his phone probably died, or something. Got stuck somewhere with no service. Is doing something else. Something fun. Whatever. It’s not a big deal.

He hopes.


	7. Chapter 7

**Still 2019**

The day comes and goes, Brian has gone to bed, and Dennis still hasn’t come back. Mac is sitting on the couch, watching TV and scrolling through Twitter on his phone, trying to keep his brain occupied so he doesn’t have a heart attack from worrying about where the _fuck_ Dennis is.

And then—nothing precedes it, nothing foreshadows it—he hears the key turn in the lock, the door creaking familiarly as it opens. Mac looks up, tries not to seem like he was too worried, and Dennis is closing the door with one hand, holding a small wooden crate in the crook of his other arm.

”Dennis, where—” Mac doesn’t get to finish his question because Dennis sets the wooden crate down on the coffee table. He doesn’t say anything, just straightens up again and stares at the box on the table.

”What is this?” Mac asks.

”Just open it,” Dennis snaps.

”What’s the game here?” Normally, Mac would be down to open any container Dennis might give him, but something about Dennis’s demeanor right is making him hesitate. He looks at Dennis and points at the box. “Is this full of, like, live scorpions or something?”

”What?” It seems to take Dennis a second to catch up. “No. Why would I make you open a box of _live scorpions_?”

Mac furrows his brow. “Is it full of _dead_ scorpions?”

”Just open it, man,” Dennis says, then—and this is what does it—he adds, in a voice so fragile you could break it with a breath, “Please.”

”Fine,” Mac says. He pries the lid off of the crate, which is full of straw. He pushes it all to the side until he finds an envelope with his name on it.

His hands go numb as he reads through the contents of the envelope. He looks up at Dennis, feeling dizzy. The papers are full of legal bullshit in small print, but a few words stick out, and Mac can hardly believe this is happening.

”Um,” Mac begins, then pauses to clear his throat and compose himself because he’s on the verge of tears. “What is—”

”Those are the papers we’d have to fill out.” Dennis says, stumbling over how quickly the words come out. “Y’know, if you want to, like. Adopt Brian and stuff. But—”

”Dennis, I—”

” _But_ , before you say anything else, before you make any kind of decision, you should know that, uh, if you _did_ want to adopt him, we—you and I—would have to be ’legally bound.’”

”’Legally bound,’” Mac repeats. “What the fuck does _that_ mean?”

”Well, some might call it ’married.’”

”Wait.” Mac blinks, eyebrows raised. “Dennis, are—are you—”

”I am _not_ proposing to you right now,” Dennis says very quickly, like he had expected this to come up.

”Then...what are you doing?”

”I’m just _suggesting_ that—y’know, that we do _that_ part” (Dennis gestures out the window) “so we can do _this_ part.” (Dennis points at the crate on the coffee table.)

”Oh.” Mac wants to laugh; he feels it in his chest. He bites his lip to keep it down. “So it’s like a scheme.”

”If you like.”

”A scheme to get married.”

”Yes.”

”And you’re asking me if I want to do the scheme.”

”Yes, obviously,” Dennis bites.

”The scheme of getting married.”

”Oh my god! Where are you going with this?”

Mac crosses his arms and looks up at Dennis, smirking. “Sounds like a proposal to me.”

”Okay, if you want to get _technical_ about it, then yes, I am _proposing_ a scheme, and yes, that scheme _is_ getting married, but I am not _proposing to you_ —what are you—stop that—”

Mac can’t help it; his smirk has stretched into an all-out grin. It was either that, or laugh in Dennis’s face, or start crying, so it seemed like the best option, but now Dennis grimaces and he covers his face with his hands. “Shut _up_.”

”I didn’t say anything.”

”Shut up!”

”Hey, come on, man.” Mac stands up, doesn’t want to get too close, settles for hovering around him like a worried hummingbird with a heartbeat just as fast. “Look at me.”

” _No_.” He seems to sense Mac’s presence and turns around, facing away from Mac. He sounds like Brian about to throw a temper tantrum. “You’re making fun of me.”

”I’m not, I swear,” Mac says. “I’m just—you caught me by surprise, can you blame me?”

”I can _always_ blame you.”

”What’s with the box?”

”It’s stupid.”

”Tell me.”

”It was supposed to be like the RPG.”

Mac can’t help but giggle at that.

”Shut up! Forget it. Just forget—”

”Wait, Dennis, I’m saying yes.”

It hangs in the air for a long moment before Dennis finally turns, drops his hands, and meets Mac’s eyes. “Oh.”

”Yeah, dude, I think it’s a great idea,” Mac says. “I mean, did you really think I would say no?”

”Yeah, kind of.”

”Why?”

Dennis shrugs. “Thought maybe you’d get all weird about, like, if you could still bang other people.”

”Oh—”

”Which—you _can_ , by the way. Bang other people, I mean,” Dennis assures him, then hurries to correct himself: “I mean, not like, _’other_ people’ like you and I are _also_ banging, I just mean—”

”No, I know—”

”Unless you—”

”Wait, do _you_ want—”

”No, I’m—”

”But you just said—”

”That’s not what I meant.”

”Then what _did_ you mean?”

Dennis breathes in through his nose, taking a second to center himself. “I meant that we don’t have to tell anyone about this and, like, if you want to bang other people, that’s fine, this is just like. A legal thing.” He looks at Mac, then a question glittering in his eyes. “Right?”

”Right.” Dennis keeps looking at him, like he’s expecting more. But Mac’s never been good at reading the different kinds of glitter that can appear in Dennis’s eyes, so he just says, “And you can too. Bang other people, or people, or whatever.”

”Yeah, obviously.” The glitter disappears, whatever it meant, and then, for some reason, they shake on it. Dennis’s hand is clammy but warm.

He is acutely aware that neither of them have been on a date in over a year.

* * * 

So the next day they go to the courthouse and get a marriage license. And then they have to wait for three more days before they can _actually_ get married. Which is, like, whatever. What’s three days?

Mac can’t even keep his head straight about the whole thing. (No pun intended.) Whenever he’s imagined his wedding, it’s been a huge party where Dennis and Charlie, his co-best men (because choosing between them would almost certainly end in someone, probably Dee, going to the hospital), would give a speech about what a badass dude Mac is, and how they all feel safer with him around, and how of course whoever he’s marrying (some faceless, genderless entity) would want to marry Mac, and they’re so lucky to have him, and they love him _so_ much. And Mac would tear off his tuxedo to reveal a gi and he’d put on a clinic of all his best karate moves in front of the adoring crowd (made up of even more faceless, genderless entities).

Apparently, that’s not what getting married is going to be like for Mac. The whole scheme makes sense, and he knows that it’s primarily for Brian’s sake, but he can’t help but be a little bit sad that getting married for him isn’t going to be about love. You only get one chance to get married, after all, and this is Mac’s chance, so he’s gotta take it, he guesses. (And divorce is out of the picture, because Mac’s is _actually_ Catholic, unlike those poser Christians.) So...it’s whatever. It’s fine.

And he loves Dennis. He does. And that’s not a bad thing anymore. He’s not so tightly wound around Dennis that he can’t figure out how to behave. Dennis doesn’t snap at him as much anymore, either. Which is to say, he still snaps a _lot_ , but for Dennis that’s a huge improvement from _all the time_. They’ve both just gotten...slower. Quieter. So instead of, you know, wanting Dennis to constantly praise him and tell him he’s good and touch him and stuff, he just...knows that Dennis is gonna be around. And that’s enough for Mac, really. He doesn’t mind marrying _Dennis_. It makes a certain kind of sense, like if you were telling the story of their lives together, of _course_ they would end up together, just like of _course_ Ross was always gonna chase down Rachel at the airport in _Friends_ , of _course_ Harry was always gonna meet Sally and kiss her at midnight on New Year’s Eve several years later, of _course_ Bruce Willis was talking to a dead kid the whole time. It’s just, you know. Mac wishes that Dennis was in love with him too.

It’s a lot to process during the 72 hours they have to wait before their date at the courthouse, and Dennis seems totally cool about the whole thing. They’ve been given a slot of time—10 am to 11 am. Apparently a bunch of other couples are going to be there at the same time; it’s kind of a first come, first serve thing.

Totally by accident, the date ends up being on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17. It just so happened that the day Dennis “proposed” was March 13, and the next day was March 14, and three days after that was March 17. It feels appropriate.

On March 16, though, Mac wakes up and Dennis is gone. Not next to him in bed. Not in the house. The note on the coffee maker just says “Went out.”

It gives Mac a sick feeling in his stomach. The lack of a “From Dennis” or a “Be back later” feels ominous. Their story seemed like it should end with the two of them getting married, but on second thought, Mac realizes that it could just as easily end with Dennis running away again. It’s not like he hasn’t done it before, and the day before their so-called “wedding” seemed like a prime time to do it—the most dramatic moment possible, which was totally Dennis’s brand.

Mac is still standing in front of the coffee maker, dumbly staring at the note in his hands, when Brian comes out of his room. He makes a beeline for the TV, turns it on to some cartoon, and plops down on the couch, and Mac feels a little bit better, because even if Dennis _would_ leave, surely he wouldn’t leave Brian behind. Right?

They didn’t tell Brian about the whole getting-legally-married thing. Well, that’s not quite true. They _tried_ , which, if you ask Mac, makes them great fathers. They can give themselves credit for _trying_. Most fathers don’t even try.

Here’s how it went, on the day before, March 15:

INT. MAC AND DENNIS’S APARTMENT, NIGHT

DENNIS: Hey Brian, can Mac and I talk to you for a second?

BRIAN: Why?

DENNIS: Uh...well, do you know what ’married’ means?

BRIAN: Um, duh? It’s like what you guys are.”

[Mac and Dennis exchange a look, and then shrug]

DENNIS [under his breath]: Well, that was a freebie.

BRIAN: So what is it?

MAC: What is what?

BRIAN: Am I in trouble?

DENNIS: Uh, yeah, your room is messy. Go clean it.

And then Brian rolled his eyes in this really funny way he’s been doing, he looks _just_ like Dennis when he does it, and then he retreats to his room and shuts the door and they both hear the booping and clanging and crunching sounds of his Gameboy or Switch or whatever the fuck he’s got now, and then Mac looked at Dennis and was like, “I guess we’ll explain it to him when he’s older?”

And Dennis was like, “I guess?”

And Mac thought, I wonder what exactly we’ll tell him by the time he’s older. Because it felt sort of like the truth hasn’t fully shaken itself out yet. And then Mac ordered a pizza.

So, yeah, they _tried_. They get credit for that, right?

”Whatcha watchin’, dude?” Mac asks, joining Brian on the couch.

Brian proceeds to explain all the intricacies of the plot of this cartoon to Mac, who cannot follow it for shit, because Brian is about as bad at telling stories as Charlie is, and then Brian says at one point, “Charlie watches this show too,” and Mac laughs to himself like yeah, that tracks, and when Brian is done explaining, he leans up against Mac, and Mac smiles and thinks: _I’m never gonna get sick of this._

And then he thinks: _Dennis better fucking come back._


	8. Chapter 8

**STILL 2019**

The parking lot of Eastern State Correctional Facility looks almost exactly the same as Dennis remembers it: weeds growing through cracks in the pavement, potholes filled with dark tar, faded white lines designating the parking spots.

He’s in his car, idling at the gated entrance, finger hovering over the button he just needs to press in order to get a ticket and enter. Except the churning adrenaline that had driven him all the way here has vanished, and now he’s stuck.

All those years ago, when they were young but already damaged beyond repair, he and Mac were in this very same place, actually in this very same car. That day was the first time Dennis had ever seen Mac cry, and he’d _hated_ it. The Mac he knew was strong. Stupid as hell, but strong. He could take a beating, emotionally or physically, and he’d yell, he’d fight back, and sometimes he would rat people out, but he never cried.

Crying is disgusting. It only happens when you have so many emotions inside of you that they have no choice but to ooze out of every orifice in your face, out of your eyes, of course, but also out of your nose and mouth and pores, and Dennis has been known to cry so hard he throws up, and sometimes the vessels around his eyes burst, either from the crying itself or the vomiting. So crying is not just tears: it’s snot, drool, vomit, sweat, blood. It forces you to succumb to the failures of the body.

As a teenager, once Dennis felt that sickeningly familiar tightening in his throat, he knew it was all over. The best he could do was run and hide somewhere like a wounded animal until he could get his hands on one of his Get-Happy-Quick Schemes. Unfortunately, one of those schemes was weed, and Mac was his only connection, so that meant Mac saw him crying a lot when they were teenagers.

It’s not like Mac was particularly _good_ at handling Dennis when he was crying, but he also wasn’t the _worst_. He’d just stick around and smoke with him and talk on and on about himself until Dennis was too high to follow any of it, and then they’d go steal chips and candy from 7-Eleven and find somewhere to eat them until it was time to go home or back to school or whatever.

So if someone had asked Dennis back then, ’What do you do to stop crying?’, he would have told them: just go buy some weed from Mac. But when Mac was sitting in the very same seat Dennis is sitting in now, hunched over the steering wheel and sobbing, he couldn’t tell Mac to buy weed from himself. So he was at a total loss, and Dennis can’t remember for the life of him what they actually said to each other, but he does remember that he was certain he had fucked everything up between them.

And now it’s like 30 something years later and they’re getting _married_ tomorrow.

A car horn blasts, snapping him out of his revery and into the present moment; there’s a car waiting behind him; there’s Luther waiting for him inside the prison because he called ahead; according to the clock on the dashboard, thirteen minutes have gone by since he first pulled up; and what the fuck does Dennis think he’s doing?

He opens his door and steps out, motioning for the guy behind him to back his car up.

The guy gestures forward, like he wants Dennis to just go through.

Dennis motions more emphatically for the guy to back up, which the guy only responds to by blasting his horn for like 15 seconds, which makes Dennis blood boil, one thing leads to another, and the bad news is that Dennis is going to have a black eye on his wedding day.

But the good news is that he successfully turns around and drives back home, leaving Luther sitting alone in the visiting room, waiting for someone that’s never going to come.

* * * 

Mac sits on their couch, stunned, feeling like a rug has been torn out from beneath him. Dennis at the other end of the couch; it feels like he’s much farther away.

”Can you just say something?” Dennis asks quietly. “Anything?”

Mac tries to think of something to say, but he really only has one question on his mind: “Why did you tell me?”

”I—I don’t know.”

”You could have just not told me.”

”Are you _mad_ that I told you?”

”No.”

”Then why does it matter?”

”I don’t know.”

”Okay.”

Mac screws up his face, trying to comprehend all of this. It doesn’t make any sense. Dennis _hates_ his father. Mac hasn’t even talked to his father in two years. “What were you going to say to him?”

”I don’t know.”

”You drove all the way up there to talk to him, you had to have some idea of what you wanted to say.”

”I really didn’t.”

”I don’t believe you.”

”I don’t know! I guess I was going to tell him, you know, fuck off, you’re shitty dad, Mac is going to be a much better dad that you ever were, you don’t get to tell him what to do, stuff like that.”

”But you didn’t tell him that.”

”I told you, I left without going inside.”

”And the black eye?”

Dennis reaches up and touches the black and blue around his eye like he just remembered it was there. “Fight in the parking lot.”

”Jesus Christ, Dennis.”

”It’s fine. It doesn’t hurt. Black eyes always hurt more the next day, you know that.”

Mac chews on his lip. “Maybe—maybe we should go back.”

”To where? The _prison_?”

”Yeah,” Mac shrugs, focusing on a hangnail on his thumb. “You know. I haven’t seen him in two years. And he was so happy when, you know, before the whole thing—when he thought I was talking about having a kid? He was like, finally proud of me. So maybe now that I am going to be a—you know. I think we should tell him.”

”We?” Dennis’s eyebrows shoot up.

”I mean, obviously, you’re coming with me. You’re the other dad.”

”Let me get this straight. You want to go visit your piece-of-shit homophobic dad, in prison, with me, who you are getting gay-married to, to tell him that you are adopting a child with me, who—again—you are getting _gay-married_ to?”

”Well, don’t say it like that, the gay-married thing is just a technicality, right?”

”I mean—it’s—”

Mac looks at Dennis, cocks his head. “It _is_ a technicality, right?”

Dennis shakes his head like he’s trying to shake of bunch of gnats. “I mean, yes, of course it’s a technicality. Like, we’re both going to be parents and it just so happens that we have to get married to do it and we just so happen to be both men and one of those men just so happens to be gay. But from the outside, that’s going to look pretty fucking gay, which is why _we’re not telling anyone_ that we’re getting married.”

”No, I know that. But it’s not like my dad is gonna spread rumors about us. He’s in prison.” Solid argument, Mac thinks.

”We’re not going to tell him.”

”Well, fine, I’ll just go alone.”

”Why? What the fuck do you hope to get out of it? He’s hated you for your entire life, you think he’s just going to turn around and love you? Just because you have a son? What if he hates you _more_ because you have a son?”

”He wouldn’t.”

”Yes, he would.”

”You don’t know that.”

”Yes, I do!”

”How the fuck could you possibly know that?”

Dennis buries his face in his hands for a very, very long minute, then wordlessly gets up and goes into the bedroom. Fine. Discussion over, then. Mac wins. He’ll go tomorrow. If Dennis won’t drive him, maybe Frank will. If Frank won’t drive him, he’ll just hotwire the Range Rover.

But then Dennis comes back out, holding something in his hands: a tightly folded up piece of paper.

”What’s that?” Mac asks.

”It’s from your father.”

There’s that feeling again: the rug, pulled right out from under him. “From when?”

”I don’t remember exactly,” Dennis says, unfolding the envelope with shaking hands. “A few weeks after June. In 2018.”

The significance of that date hits Mac like a ton of bricks and the next few moments are blur as he opens the envelope, removes the letter, and reads it:

_Mac,_

_You + me have never gotten along. We’re very different people. I know you want me to be proud of you but you havent become the kind of man I can be proud of. Let me tell you, there is no bigger disappointment in life than that._

_If you want to do something right for a change, please promise me that you will never have a son. Don’t make the same mistake I did. That is the best thing you can do for me._

_Luther_

Mac reads the letter three times before he looks at Dennis. “Why didn’t you show this to me?”

”I mean.” Dennis gestures to the letter in Mac’s hands. “You read it, right? I couldn’t give that to you, not that summer.”

”You shouldn’t have kept this from me.”

”At least I didn’t throw it out?” Dennis offers, like he knows it’s not enough.

”What am I going to do?”

”What do you mean?”

”He doesn’t want me to have a son.”

It’s like an alarm goes off in Dennis’s head, the way his face changes so completely as he realizes what Mac is implying. He sits on the couch close to Mac. “No, no, no, Mac, don’t back out on me on this, don’t—”

”But he says it’s the best thing I can do for him!”

”Don’t—”

”This is the first time in my life he’s told me what he wants from me, and maybe he’ll finally—”

”Oh my _god_! You’re always thinking about what _he_ wants from _you_. Do you ever think maybe _you’re_ allowed to want things from _him_?”

”But he’s a great dad. I’m the one that fucked up.”

Dennis takes a deep breath. “What is the number one thing you owe to Brian?”

”What?”

”Or—okay, take me, for example. What is the number one thing _I_ owe to Brian, as his dad?”

”Dennis, stop. You’re not making sense.”

”I’m _not_ a good dad. I know that. I don’t know what I’m doing half the time and that kid is going to be very screwed up the older he gets. But, like, the _bare_ minimum I can do is—give a shit. You know? Like, accept him for who he is, or whatever hippie bullshit people say.”

”What’s your point?”

”Giving a shit is the _bare minimum_ a dad is supposed to do for their kids. That’s what a father owes. Your dad doesn’t give a shit about you, and he doesn’t, you know, accept you as you are, and that is _him_ failing _you_. Not the other way around. So stop being sad about it.”

Mac tries to find a hole in the argument.

It’s airtight.

”So you’re saying I just got dealt a shitty hand? And there’s nothing I can do?

”Well...yeah.”

”Then I don’t think I _can_ stop being sad about it.”

”Okay, fine,” Dennis says. “But, you know, I got dealt a shitty hand too, and so did Dee, and Charlie, and Frank, kind of.”

”I mean, God did make him look like _that_.”

”Exactly. So, you know, we fold early, and then we can just all sit at the loser’s table and drink.”

”Together.”

”Don’t be corny. Now, please,” Dennis puts a hand on Mac’s thigh. “ _Please_ be Brian’s dad with me, because if I have to deal with him screaming over getting a shot at the doctor’s one more time, I’m going to explode.”

Mac laughs a little and says, “Okay.”


	9. Chapter 9

**2020**

Dennis supposes that statistically speaking there was a _slim_ chance of this happening, but no one in their right minds would have ever put money on it. It’s not at all how he imagined his future, but then again, he never expected to live past 20. And after he turned 20, he didn’t expect to live past 25, and so on and so forth and now he’s 45 and here he is. It would be stupid to deny the truth any longer, and Dennis is a lot of things but stupid is not one of them. He and Mac make meals together, pay bills together, go to dinner together. They share a checking account. They sleep in the same bed. They’re married, for fuck’s sake. They have a _child_. Worst of all, _they plan their weeks around whatever meat they’ve already begun defrosting_.

It’s disgusting, it’s boring, it’s fun, it’s easy: it’s a goddamn relationship. Against all odds and despite his best efforts, Dennis has fallen in something that looks a lot like love. And, even more unlikely: he’s almost okay with it.

But there is one last barrier to cross that Dennis can’t seem to navigate, and it’s sort of a little bit definitely driving him crazy.

He catches himself almost kissing Mac, apparently out of instinct, but it’s a weird instinct to have when you’ve never done something like that before, something like that being kissing someone for no reason other than they’re being cute and kind of stupid. Thankfully, Dennis manages to stop himself every time.

It’s definitely _weird_ that they haven’t kissed, but the thing is that no matter how it happens or what they do, it’s going to be a Big Deal and Dennis wishes they could just pretend that they had their first kiss years ago, that it’s been that way forever, so they could slip into it easily and without having to admit anything.

It’s okay, though. Dennis is an expert at not wanting things, at restriction. He’ll be fine. Mac doesn’t need to know. Dennis can live without it.

* * * 

It is painfully, hilariously obvious to Mac that Dennis wants to kiss him.

It’s obvious in the way that Dennis flicks his eyes down to Mac’s lips every so often. He doesn’t even wait until he thinks Mac isn’t looking; he does it while they’re having a direct conversation.

It’s obvious in the way that Dennis touches Mac’s arm when he’s laughing at a stupid joke, it’s obvious in the way that Dennis lets their hands brush when they’re walking down the street. It’s obvious in the way that Dennis tries not to smile at Mac pushing Brian on the swings at the playground. It’s obvious when Dennis is drunk and unaware that he’s practically fellating his beer bottle while staring directly at Mac. It’s obvious when Dennis accidentally calls him “babe” and, for the sake of Dennis’s ego, Mac pretends it was a joke and they start saying it “sarcastically.” It’s obvious when Dennis texts him a single emoji out of the blue, and always one of the weird, rarely-used, why-do-they-even-have-that emojis, like the puzzle piece, or the Easter Island head, or the acorn. It’s just _obvious_.

It’s also obvious that Dennis is not going to be the one to break through the barrier. Mac isn’t sure _why_ he won’t, because _clearly_ Mac would be fine with it, but whatever.

Mac realizes with a thrill one unremarkable day in January that if Dennis refuses to initiate, that means Mac can _plan_ their first kiss, make it something badass, something special, something extraordinary.

What started as excitement, however, quickly turns into crippling pressure. Dennis loves fanfare and finesse, loves dramatics, loves grandeur—but there’s too much baggage on Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day is too busy, he can’t do it on April Fool’s Day because Dennis might think it’s a joke, the Fourth of July comes and goes and then the fireworks are over, Halloween is really more focused on Brian these days, Thanksgiving isn’t romantic enough, mistletoe is way too cliché, and then it’s New Year’s Eve.

Mac can’t believe that he’s lived with this plan for a whole year and stayed sane. No, not even just a plan—it’s a _desire_. He’s fantasized about it literally every single day for the past year. But then again, Mac knows he really shouldn’t be surprised by the kinds of things a person can live with. Hope keeps us going, and if Mac knows anything, it’s that hope is exceedingly hard to kill completely.

Mac convinces Charlie and Frank and Dee to take Brian out to see the fireworks downtown. Brian weirdly loves Dee, which Mac finds disappointing but it’s helpful tonight. That leaves Mac and Dennis to hold things down at Paddy’s, which honestly has never been a big New Years’ spot, and Mac is going to kiss Dennis at midnight. He has to, or else it’s never going to happen.

Mac is on edge all night. Time seems to go by so slowly, but finally it’s ten minutes till the new year. Dennis is acting weird, too, and Mac wonders if he knows what’s coming, wonders how he feels about it, starts second-guessing the whole stupid thing, has a rare moment more foresight that tells him maybe this will upset the delicate balance they’ve reconstructed since Dennis came back to Philadelphia. Maybe the whole thing between them functions _because_ it’s not physical.

There’s three old drunks in the bar, and a gaggle of chicks with short hair, and Mac listens to them as they count down from 10, listens to them reach 1, listens to them shouting “Happy New Year!”, and Dennis is standing right next to him behind the bar, and Mac’s heart is beating out of his chest, and...

Then it’s 12:01.

**2021**

The rest of the night, their conversation is stilted and awkward and forced. Mac is kicking himself. _Come on, dude, you’re such a fucking pussy, you think you’re badass? You’re not badass, you’re chickenshit. Dennis is going to leave you. You should go back on Grindr, you should just go back in the closet, you should get blackout drunk, you should—_

Mac doesn’t do any of that. He and Dennis just kick everyone out at 2 am and walk home without cleaning up.

They stop at the hilariously named 24-hour KUM-N-GO LUBE-N-SNAX gas station/garage on the way home to get some Excedrin and paper towels. The lights inside are so bright, like they’re designed to highlight every single imperfection on their faces. Arabic hip-hop is blasting over the speakers, and the cashier is sitting behind the counter scrolling through his phone.

They’re in the aisle with the toiletries (which is also the aisle with the soup and the chips). There’s no Excedrin, so Dennis is studying the other painkillers, his tongue poking out just a bit as he concentrates, and Mac has never been more in love than this.

”So.” It comes out higher than Mac anticipated. He clears his throat. “2021, huh?”

Dennis glances at him out of the corner of his eye. “Yeah.” He sounds distracted.

”Crazy.”

”I know, right?”

The hum of the refrigerators and freezers sometimes descends into a harsh grinding sound; one Arabic hip-hop song ends and another starts; a siren wails in the distance. It’s cold outside, but it’s warm in here; Mac’s fingers had gone numb on the walk but are now tingling back to life, and, well...

It’s as good a time as any.

Mac doesn’t say anything at all as he takes a step closer to Dennis; Dennis looks up casually, like he’s expecting Mac to say something boring and normal, like, ’Hey, I’m gonna go get some beer,’ or ’Look, there’s one more bottle of Excedrin behind the Advil.’

When Mac doesn’t say anything, Dennis frowns, guarded. “What?”

Mac watches as Dennis’s expression changes from guarded to outright confused, and Mac can’t stop staring, and then Dennis’s eyebrows raise very slightly like he’s just figuring out what’s about to happen.

And then Mac’s hands are on either side of Dennis’s face, Dennis’s arms are wrapped around Mac’s waist, and Dennis is sighing into Mac’s lips, and Mac has been wondering about this for so long, thinking about how it might feel, whether it would be earth-shattering or sexy or funny or disastrous or, or, or—there were so many possibilities, so many ways it could go, so many ways it could be good, and now that it’s finally happening, it’s—it’s—

Familiar.

Like they’ve done this a thousand times before.

When Dennis first came back from North Dakota, the two of them had started watching rom-coms after Brian went to bed, because the action movies they liked so much were too loud and would wake Brian up. And it turned out that bad romcoms were great for their witty commentary. At least, that was what they told the gang whenever Dee looked at them weird for Dennis joking around and saying “You complete me” when Mac handed him a beer or something.

But secretly, Mac found the rom-coms to be comforting. The structure was a warm blanket he could wrap himself up in whenever the world got to be too crazy. When he and Dennis would fight, he’d think to himself, _This is the Act 2 conflict, it’ll work out fine._

And all of the first kisses in those movies were cathartic and emotional and overwhelming. Kissing Dennis isn’t like that at all. It lasts for two seconds and they don’t even open their mouths, and Mac realizes that he had been harboring the hope that their first kiss would be something magical, different, cinematic, life-changing, extraordinary. That was why he had been trying so hard to plan it, to make sure the scenario was just right.

But this is good, too.

After they both pull away, Dennis keeps his eyes closed, and even in the dim glow of the streetlights, Mac can see the lines on Dennis’s face, can see through the layers of makeup the faint acne scars from when Dennis was a hormonal teenager, the age spots, the liver spots, the stubble, and Dennis would hate to know that Mac is noticing these things at all, would prefer to appear perfect and unmarred by time and vice.

But it doesn’t matter. Mac loves Dennis not _in spite_ of those imperfections, not _because_ of those imperfections; he just loves Dennis.

The seconds tick by. Dennis doesn’t open his eyes. Someone outside on the street shouts, _Go fuck yourself, bitch!_ Mac’s stomach grumbles a bit. The gas station smells like stale coffee and old hotdogs. The Arabic hip-hop is still playing.

Finally, Dennis opens his eyes, giving Mac a predictably unreadable expression. “Happy New Year,” Dennis murmurs.

”Uh.” Mac’s suddenly tongue feels too big for his mouth. “Yeah. Um. Mazel tov.”

The corners of Dennis’s lips turn down a bit in a bemused smirk. “ _Mazel tov_?”

”What?”

”Mazel tov,” Dennis repeats.

”What’s your point?”

”Where the fuck did _you_ learn _mazel tov_?”

Mac rolls his eyes, extracts himself from Dennis’s embrace, a little embarrassed. “It’s what Jewish people say when good things happen. It’s like ’hooray’!”

”I know that,” Dennis says, filling in the space between him and Mac again. “But you’re, like, the most antisemitic person I know.”

”Oh, come on, that’s not fair. Have you _met_ Frank? Or what about _Dee_?”

”Yeah, but—”

”Or _you_! You went to _Nazi camp_!”

”You’re _never_ going to let that go, are you?”

”No, but I mean, it’s fine, I know you’ve been making a monthly donation to the Jewish Defense League since you found out.”

Dennis scoffs. “I do not!”

”It’s okay, I won’t tell anyone you’re secretly a little bit of a decent person,” Mac says, wrapping his arms around Dennis’s waist and pulling him closer. “No one would believe me anyway.”

”Okay, but where did you learn ’mazel tov’?”

”From Oliver’s moms. Turns out Jews aren’t so bad once you get to know them. Sorry—Jewish people. Apparently I’m not allowed to say Jews—sorry. Jewish people.”

”So it _is_ a slur?”

”You know, I’m still not sure? But I figure, better not risk it.”

Dennis considers Mac for a moment. “You goin’ soft on me, Ronald?” he teases.

Mac rolls his eyes. “Whatever, dude.”

This time, Dennis is the one to kiss Mac. It lasts longer than two seconds; it’s deeper, their lips slot together, Mac presses up against Dennis in the aisle of the KUM-N-GO LUBE-N-SNAX, rakes his fingers through Dennis hair, and god, Mac just wants to touch him _everywhere_. They pull apart again, panting heavily, and Dennis says, urgently, “We should get home.”

”Yeah,” Mac says, nodding fast and eager. “Yeah, lets go.”

They practically trip over themselves as they make their way to the door. “Wait, what about the paper towels?” Mac asks, stopping in his tracks, suddenly remembering. “Leave them,” Dennis says, grabbing Mac’s wrist to pull him back on track and dragging him towards the door.

 _Gladly,_ Mac thinks, and lets himself be dragged.

* * * 

An hour or so later, they’re lying in bed next to each other, dazed. Dennis is on his back, staring at the ceiling; Mac is on his side, staring at Dennis. They’re quiet while they allow their breathing to slow down, to even out. It hadn’t even taken that long, but they’re both getting older, both a little out of practice, so this kind of thing just isn’t as quite as easy as it used to be.

After a long stretch of silence, Mac reaches out and puts his hand on Dennis’s bare chest, and Dennis puts his own hand over top of it.

After another long silence, Dennis says to the ceiling, “Can you say it first?”

”Say what?”

”You know.”

”Uh...thanks for the dick?”

”Holy shit, not _that_ , dumbass.”

”Oh. Um...” Mac pauses, then tries: “ _You’re_ _welcome_ for the dick?”

Dennis turns on his side to face Mac. “Are you being _deliberately_ obtuse?”

”No, I swear!” Mac insists, his eyes big and dumb and open and beautiful. “I don’t even know what ’obtuse’ means!”

”Come on!” Dennis urges. He half wants to sink into the floor and disappear from embarrassment, half wants to kiss Mac’s stupid face. “You know...the L-word.”

”Lightbulb?”

”Oh my god.”

”Linoleum?”

”No!”

”I seriously don’t know what you’re talking about, you have to help me out a little bit here.”

”’I love you,’ asshole!”

Mac smirks, smug as shit, and Dennis realizes he’s been had. “I love you too,” Mac says.

”Oh my god, you’re such a dick.” Dennis smacks him lightly on the arm as Mac cackles.

”You love it,” Mac says, and Dennis thinks, _I really do_.

* * * 

It is the first warm day of spring and Dennis decides it is the perfect day to surprise Mac and Brian with a trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Honestly, despite the long drive and the traffic and the crowd and the annoying docents and a bunch of snotty-nosed little germ factories who are much more stupid than Brian, it’s a pretty great day.

After they eat lunch outside on the grass, Mac plays catch with Brian, looking like the textbook definition of father and son. It’s very cute or whatever, and it makes Dennis want to barf. Also his jeans are a little too tight, and he has a bit of a headache, and he’s definitely _not_ looking forward to the traffic on the way home.

Dennis always thought that there would come a time when everything in his life would finally be perfect, and he’d finally achieve happiness and perfection and everyone would realize that he was extraordinary and everything after that would be great. He thought he _had_ found that moment a bunch of times, always followed by an extreme downfall; divorcing Maureen and having to pay alimony for years afterwards, having a one-night stand in North Dakota and having his entire life changed, buying a flatscreen TV and then immediately having to use it to buy the silence of some guy he accidentally kidnapped. It all added up to proof that the universe just didn’t want Dennis to have good things.

And things _aren’t_ good, not completely. None of them are ever going to achieve eternal happiness. But for the first time, it occurs to Dennis that maybe that’s okay. They’re all just tossing the ball to the universe, after all, and they just have to trust that the universe will toss it back at some point. In the meantime, it’s enough that he’s with Mac and Brian, and they’re both smiling. His life hasn’t been extraordinary, but there are moments that have come close; it’s the first warm day of spring, and it won’t always be sunny, but the sun is shining for now. It’s enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ugh, barf me a river, am i right? 
> 
> anyway i hope you someone likes it <3 this has been a fun challenge! love u all <3


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